Message on a Bottle

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After submitting hundreds of designs to the Mondavis, they selected a few. She went to France. The baron said “Au Contraire, Non.” She finally won approval with an image based on the Roman god Janus, with back-to-back profiles of Mondavi and Rothschild. After months of bickering over whose head would be positioned higher, the label came out in 1980 and won praise for its high-energy design in a shade of blue that was in total contrast to the conventional black-and-white label of the time.

“Robert and his winemakers enjoy the good life of fine art, food and wine, and the bottle’s look and feel was to reflect that,” Pate says. Another high-end Pate client is Bill Harlan, known for his hard-to-get boutique wines, Harlan Estate and Bond, which start at $200 a bottle.

Because Harlan is also a collector of old stamps and currency, Pate decided to integrate that formal, vintage feel in the label. For Bill Harlan’s wines, Pate used an older printing and engraving technique called intaglio, which literally presses an image into the paper in addition to the inked material.

DESIGNER LABELS

Rather than artists, wine packaging is increasingly created by people with marketing backgrounds. Horiszny started out in fragrance and cosmetic marketing before realizing the similarities between perfume and wine. “People don’t know what’s in the bottle, so they buy based on the brand image and sense of style,” Horiszny says. His first wine project was Columbia Crest, now Washington state’s best-selling wine.

But the actual winemakers still have a hand in designs that will promote the fruits of their labor. Bonny Doon Vineyard near Santa Cruz is known for its quirky, innovative labels, and owner Randall Grahm is very involved with the artists he hires for their creations. “I ended up doing it because it was fun, and I somehow seemed to be helpful for the process,” he says. “Every label is different — I may come to them with an idea to develop it, or else they’ll suggest something. We go back and forth, improvising. It’s a true collaboration.”

One of Grahm’s first hires was Chuck House, who had just done his first label for Frog’s Leap, deemed a success. Now House is one of the most sought-after designers, but he and Grahm still meet in person to discuss labels in hole-in-the-wall restaurants near House’s Sonoma home.

One of those eateries inspired a redesign of Bonny Doon’s Pacific Rim Riesling. “My high-concept idea was to make a dreamscape of a woman dreaming about Germany with all these Freudian images around, a train coming out of a tunnel and the Hindenburg flying over. A person would look through the bottle as if in a dream.”

House did an illustration, and the two arranged to meet at a Santa Rosa taqueria, but it was closed. Instead they ended up at a sushi joint in Rohnert Park that had standard plastic menus with photos of sushi. “I was using the sushi menu to explain my ideas and then I noticed that if I put the menu on the back of the label and turned my head, it looked like the sushi were swimming in the bottle. We cut up the menus right there and played with them. Then we changed the entire redesign image,” House recalls.

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