A label that survives a wine list

A wine label is seen in three situations: on a shelf at two metres, in a hand at thirty centimetres, and as a forty millimetre thumbnail on a restaurant tablet. Most labels are designed for the second and fail the first and third. We started with the thumbnail, because anything that reads there reads everywhere.

That single decision removed the illustration, doubled the size of the estate name, and moved the vintage into the one place it could be found without hunting.

The cultivar is carried by a band of colour whose position is fixed and whose width is not. It is enough to tell four wines apart at a glance and not enough to make them look like four different estates. The back label follows the legal sequence required by the liquor regulations, set so the mandatory copy does not visually dominate what a person is actually trying to read.

Two days on the farm in March, shot for the label, the trade presenter, the site and a year of social in one go. Trade photography that has to be re shot every season is a line item nobody budgets for and everybody pays.