“At GREY London we think it's time to reframe the debate and change the language around risk. To rebrand so-called "brave work" (a misleading term!) to what it really is: "smart work". To understand that the only real risk is invisibility. Sometimes the safest choices are the most dangerous ones.”
This quote comes from Adweek's Global Agency of the Year and Euro Effies Agency of the Year. The Effies are effectiveness awards.
Yes, Grey was talking about advertising. But work is work. Substitute the term brand identity, packaging solution or packaging design, and the statement remains valid.
In wine, packaging solutions work is intransigently safe, across both mainstream and boutique brands. Risky design work is how boutique brands gain footholds. Mainstream brands take occasional design risks for small vintage runs.
In liqueurs and spirits, risk is how even mainstream brands get and maintain a competitive edge, and risks are taken across both packaging and design.
According to a 2013 Nielsen Category Fundamentals study, 37% of wine purchase decisions are made in-store and 70% of specific wine-purchase decisions or selections are made at the shelf. Wine packaging design has to be eye-catching first and communicate desirable attributes second. Wine drinkers are explorers, so creating curiosity is a plus. Taste and quality are communicated through brand and packaging design first and product information provided on the packaging second.
Paper Boy bounded into the market in 2013 with unbridled confidence. And why not? This is the era of save the planet, be responsible as a company and give back more than you take.
Paper Boy was a risk – a risk that should have ‘changed the game’: “Paper Boy is a wine that breaks rules. Breaks barriers. Breaks the way we enjoy wine, even where we experience it. From mountaintops to impromptu pool parties. Heck, even the final frontier – space. It’s the first 100% fully recyclable wine that is 80% lighter than glass and made with ultra-green packaging. Paper Boy is a quality wine that comes to us by way Truett-Hurst and VML Winery. Cool and responsible all at once, Paper Boy is truly the evolved way to wine,” its makers stated.
Well, it didn’t change the game. Sure, the bottle is made from 80% used corrugated cardboard, mostly recycled from industrial uses. Yes, it's 85% lighter than a glass bottle, so it requires less fuel to ship. Yes, one cross-America truck of Paper Boy wine saves 61 gallons of diesel fuel, meaning a lot less CO2 in the atmosphere. And yes, the design by Strange & Stranger is exotically, alluringly and elegantly beautiful. But the wine was deluged in tepid reviews and the brand may even drown.
Flouting the tradition of the wine bottle is a risk too far. What risks can a wine take?
OUT THERE: Packaging that highlights what’s different about a brand.
Two Men. The two men behind Two Men wines are Dan Sims and Ben Edwards. They are wine writers, commentators and sommeliers. Making wine was a wild idea they had in Mendoza,Argentina in 2010 after supporting Franck Moreau in the Sommelier Du Monde competition in Chile. They’d seen twenty-three producers in three days, and realised they’d found something special there – not the export wine, the local malbec.
“The Two Men project is not just a wine label, but a documentation of the journey of wine-making by two men who have had a relationship with wine on every level except for the production of it. Until now.” This is why when Elmwood began developing concepts for the brand, “We created playful silhouettes of Ben and Dan to really bring the brand to life, while introducing a mix of typography styles to represent the Two Men’s constant travel.”
Este is a garagiste wine. It flouts tradition in traditional wine category. Its packaging won for its design agency, The Collective, an In Book place at D&AD the advertising and design awards that accept nothing less than ‘creative excellence’. The wine itself was the passion project of De Bortoli winemaker, Steve Webber.His dream, which he realised with Este, was to create an ultra sauvage premium sparkling wine from the Yarra Valley. It was to be the antithesis of traditional champagnes. The Collective’s job was to reflect his unconventional garagiste winemaking style, making amazing wine in small quantities with minimal intervention and none of the pomp and ceremony of the large champagne houses. The packaging had to have a sense of utilitarian rawness. Webber wanted the brand, made in tiny 500 case lots, to “look as though it had been made in a corrugated iron shed”. So everything was designed to be assembled in the winemaker’s shed. The logotype was hand-stencilled, the corks individually stamped, and the muselet secured with a cable tie.
Cantina Colli Ripani is a winery in Ripatransone whose first wine was bottled in 1977. To launch its new range, Settantasette (Italian for seventy-seven), agency Andrea Castelletti gave 5 copywriters the same brief: To give a personality to the wine by writing a brief description of one of the aspects that characterise Ripatransone, and to talk as if the wine was a person introducing itself. Each copywriter had a different wine from the new line assigned and none of them had any idea what the other one was writing about.
It then gave 5 designers one of the texts each to write in his/her own calligraphy. Then came the standout touch – the label has the eye-catchingly irregular shape of the territory of Ripatransone.
KISS: Simple graphics say, ‘look at me,’ on a cluttered retail shelf.
Terra D’Art is a family run winery in Valle de Ahilas, 70 kms from Valencia in Spain. Its brief to Juan Martinez Estudio was to create the brand identity, naming, graphic applications and labels for the wine highlighting that each was original and unique – a special production, handmade, and with a distinctive flavour.
The design began with a symbol created by famous Spanish cartoonist, Paco Roca. "We wanted to reflect that this a winery takes care of the product, handles it with consideration during the whole process and is completely handcrafted. Paco's illustration is based on one of my pictures and it couldn't be more faithful to the original shot. It is Casandra Martinez, one of the owners working in the last grape harvest,” designer Juan Martinez stated.
A CLEAR MESSAGE: Transparent and embossing labels make words and images stand out.
Clemens Strobl is for ardent wine enthusiasts. Designer, Philipp Andrasko at studio, Impack.at, used personalised hand-drawn figures on a transparent label background to draw attention to the winery’s collectors’ range.
A GREAT STORY: Tell a great story, create a good friend.
Wirra Wirra’s Scrubby Rise wine labels were designed by Parallax Design in Adelaide. A lot of Australia’s wines come from the Barossa Valley. Yes, Parallax’ pale blue cap and colourful painted image do the same job of attracting as colours on flower petals. But there’s also an intriguing story, and if you look closely you can see that in the painted image’s scene. The winery was named Scrubby Rise because the land was dead flat and contained no scrubby vegetation whatsoever. When the company formed a viewing platform over the vineyards at was nicknamed The Jetty because it overlooks old vines like a wooden jetty does the sea. So Parallax gathered these eccentricities into a brief for Australian artist, Andrew Baines, to create a picture that alluded to them in a surreal Wirra Wirra scene.
Tilly Devine, its label also designed by Parallax, is another Barossa wine, also from McLaren Vale. It, too, could have got lost in the crowd. But Parallax cleverly created its risque story in graphics and told it boldly on the label: Tilly Devine was a notorious bootlegger and madam in Sydney in the 1920s. She was so good at bootlegging that her name was used as rhyming slang for wine. And the font in which her name is written on the bottle comes from the fact that, in her heyday, Tilly was only found in one of two places – behind bars in prison or in a cocktail bar.
