Syrah - Day 20 - Label Design

We're still many months away from bottling our wine, but it's never too early to start doing the design work for our label. Based on the little experience I have from bottling beer, paper labels can be a headache. In the past I've tried labels that can be fed through a laser printer and can be applied to surfaces like a sticker (such as the Avery brand labels). They are great when you are starting with new, clean bottles. But by the time the bottle comes back for a second use, the sticker become a problem. The sticker part is a little too effective and requires a lot of scrubbing and soaking to get off the bottle. On a single bottle this isn't necessarily a problem, but increase the scale a hundred fold and your talking about an all day project of cleaning bottles so you can use them again. Many of my beer bottles retain several layers of stickum and tattered label from various previous bottlings, not ideal. In order to avoid this headache we're exploring other options for labeling.

This time around, I'm planning on trying out a different approach of labeling bottles. Inspired by the Rouge Brewery Bottles, I am trying to design a stencil that would be easy to paint onto the bottles (read: not too many layers), but would still be interesting.

The other ideas I had for it would that there was a large enough section on the label that the particular details of the wine could be written on with a grease pen or other non-permanent writing. This would allow us to reuse the bottles, but still be able to distinguish different vintages, varietals or other differences in the wine. Especially since we are producing two different varietals this year and could further complicate the matter with opting to age some of each of the batches on oak, blend some portion of the batches together, blend oak aged with non-oak aged or other combinations as we get inspired.

So for the rough draft of the wine label, I created this 15-minute-mock-up for the stencil, via Microsoft Paint (note, the black portions are what would be cut out of the stencil and therefore painted onto the wine bottle):

Still needs some work. One advantage of a stencil over a printed label, is I can make up for lack of abilities as a digital graphic artist later on when I turn the computer printout into a cardboard or plastic stencil. So those rough edges will be getting smoothed out either by someone else on a computer or by me in analog.

Slightly more interesting than the standard, default label for home winemakers: masking tape.