Lightning Labels Blog

Is There Wine in the Afterlife?

Apparently King Tutankhamen thought so. Just to make sure, though, he packed his own. Commonly known as King Tut, he ascended the Egyptian throne at the tender age of nine and was believed to be in his teens at the time of his death in 1352 BC. But that didn’t stop him from enjoying the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage! Wine jars were discovered among the objects buried in the catacombs of his tomb, intended to accompany funerary meals that would ensure a pleasant afterlife.

The jars contain some of the world’s oldest wine labels. Not only are they among the most ancient wine labels on record, they are some of the most detailed. The Boy King’s wine labels displayed enough information to meet the present day requirements of some countries’ wine label laws. One label, for instance, read “Year 5, Wine of the House-of-Tutankhamen Ruler-of-the-Southern-on, l.p.h. in the Western River. By the chief Vinter Khaa”. King Tut apparently not only wanted to ensure he would be able to drink wine in the afterlife, but he wanted to know exactly what he was drinking. Did he want to be able to pull out a particularly fine jar of wine for  one of those very special occasions one experiences following death? We will probably never know …

What we do know is that reds were apparently Tut’s wine of choice, according to the scientists that studied residue left in the jars.  Among the residue, they found the chemical that imparts color to red wine, malvidin-3-glucoside, according an article published at Scientific American. This discovery was not exactly shocking, as many ancient Egyptian tomb paintings depict red and purple grapes being pressed.

Wine Tasting Journals : Ultimate Promotional Item for Vineyards, Other Wine Sellers

If you are someone who sells wine, you likely know how challenging it can be to find promotional items relevant to your industry. If you hunt hard enough, however, you will find that there are a few great solutions to this problem. I am particularly fond of the idea of vineyards promoting their wines with wine tasting journals branded with their corporate logo. Branded wine journals also make great corporate gifts, and are the ultimate wine accessories to offer your customers, especially those looking for special gift ideas for their favorite wine lovers.

Here are a few wine journals that can be personalized to promote your unique brand:

Nomad Wine Tasting Journals offers vineyards the option of having their logo embossed on the leather cases they sell for their wine tasting journals. They come in a 5”x7” undated format that has room to record details of wine tastings, trips, purchases, dining experiences, and special trips. Each Nomad Wine Tasting Journal includes 120 pages (enough for 30 daily entries) and has also has space for recording up to eight wine tasting entries per vineyard toured, and several pages for pasting favorite wine labels.

Renaissance Art’s Small Wine Journal consists of 160 acid free 5-1/2”x7-1/2” pages. Its leather cover,  which comes with comes in a range of color and closure options, can be embossed with your logo. Each journal includes a free custom-printed title page, and is packaged in a made to order gusseted chenille pouch.

Norwood Promotional Products sells a tri-fold journal with room to record tasting notes on more than 100 wines, and its cover can be custom-printed in up to four colors with the image of your choice. The journal is 6”x9” closed; 12”x9” open.

How 'Critters' Help Sell Wine and Beer

Introducing a new author for the Lightning Labels blog: Christy Correll. Christy is our online marketing specialist and has been with Lightning Labels since the start of the year. She has a background in journalism and online marketing, and will be a regular contributor here.

Animals help sell alcoholic beverages. This is not news. AC Nielsen released a report three years ago about this wine label phenomenon.

What is news is we now have an idea of why using images of kangaroos, penguins, frogs, dogs, and other animals to peddle our products from store shelves has been so successful.

A new study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Aparna Labroo, Ravi Dhar of Yale University, and Norbert Schwartz of the University of Michigan suggests consumers buy products with labels that reflect the consumer, not the product. The findings of the report go against the traditional branding strategy of designing labels based on what the product is about.

The next time you walk down a wine or beer aisle, look closely at the bottle labels. In a wine aisle, you will find many labels depicting grapes, vineyards, and the countries where the wines are produced in. In a beer aisle, you will see many product labels featuring different types of grains and words describing beer. These images give the consumer information about the product behind the label, i.e., what the product is made from, how it tastes, and where it was produced. The makers of these beverages are following the traditional branding strategy of designing product labels based on the product itself. During that same stroll down the wine or beer aisle, will also notice a number of bottle labels featuring all kinds of animals -- and not just cute, fuzzy things such as the black lab on Spanish Peaks Black Dog Ale or the perky penguin on the Little Penguin Shiraz.

Some of the critters on these beverage labels are ugly, if not downright menacing. Take the frog on Bad Frog Beer’s product label, for example. Draped over the lettering of the product logo, he stares the consumer straight in the eye and shoots him the middle finger. Why would anyone pick that beer over one of comparable quality and taste?

In an article for Chicago Booth Magazine about the new study, Vanessa Sumo explains how putting an animal on their product label could help a wine maker build a better brand. Sumo gives the example of how a woman who frequently sees and hears great things about Kermit the Frog from her son is likely to purchase a bottle of wine with a frog on the label if she has minimal time to make a purchasing decision.

Familiarity with Kermit the Frog actually makes it easier for a consumer to visually process the image on the label. This enhances the label’s appeal and as a result makes the "frog wine" more desirable relative to its competitors.

The point is that familiarity with a particular animal on a product label causes a harried shopper to buy that product. The consumer already has a pre-established relationship with a specific animal, and transfers it to the product because of the label. If the same woman featured in Labroo, Dhar, and Schwartz’s study had been shopping for beer, would she have ended up choosing a case of Bad Frog Beer over Spanish Peaks Black Dog Ale? What if she didn’t have a son who adored Kermit the Frog, but a loyal black Labrador retriever instead?

Even if you are not in the wine and beer industry, it might be a good idea to take the findings of this study to heart the next time you re-evaluate your product label design. When was the last time you did that, by the way? I would love to hear if your product packaging design is currently working for you, as well as what -- if any -- changes you have made to your label designs over the years and how they have affected your sales.

Related Posts

Critter Labels Taking Over Wine Industry

The New Wine Label Phenomenon

QR Codes Coming to Wine Labels

Last year I wrote about QR codes that were being used by Ralph Lauren. I recently discovered two Portuguese wineries that have just started using QR codes on their wine labels. If you take a look at the back label here you will notice a normal bar code and also a funny looking square next to the bar code - that is the QR code.

The idea behind QR codes is that you can embed information in them that can be easily scanned with a cell phone camera. The most common use of QR Codes is to embed a web site URL, so you can direct the person to a specific web site when scanning the label.

In the case of these Portuguese wineries they are directing wine consumers to Adegga, an online community of wine lovers that dubs itself as a "social wine discovery" service. This is how it works. You scan the QR Code on the wine label and you will be taken to a special page on adegga.com dedicated to that particular wine. You will be able to read other people's comments about it, check wine prices, read comments from the winemaker and much more. Adegga is undertaking a very ambitious project attempting to catalog all the wine of the world with something called an AVIN, which will be a unique wine identifier (similar to ISBN numbers for books). 

Obviously there is not broad use of QR codes yet in this country. But in Japan and Europe they are becoming more common. I expect we will start to see broad adoption of this kind of technology here within 2-3 years. If there are wineries out there that would like to become part of this project then we will be happy to print your wine labels with the QR codes.

Hat tip to Jose Eduardo at the Cortes de Cima Winery in Portugal for informing me about this.

The Château Mouton Rothschild Wine Labels

I thought we should end the year with something fun. Château Mouton Rothschild is acknowledged as the world's greatest Bordeaux but what interests me most about them are their labels. Every year they commission a famous artist or sculptor to create an illustration for their wine labels. The painting featured on their 2004 (the latest vintage) was actually done by Prince Charles. Other famous names such as Picasso, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali have all had their work printed on these wine labels.

Recently I stumbled across this website that displays the entire collection of labels produced for Château Mouton Rothschild dating back to 1946. It is interesting to see how the styles and colors have changed through the years. Many of these labels have become real collectors items.

If you are lucky enough to bring in the New Year with a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild (the 2004 retails for around $300) then 2008 was probably a good year for you.

Happy New Year.

A Giraffe is a Tall Horse

Mike Carter reported on his Serious About Wine blog today about the Tall Horse selection of wines. This South African wine has beautiful labels as you can see above, but what I like most about it is the shape. They have mirrored a label design and shape perfectly so that the bottles have a very striking impact. The designer here has decided to go to the extra expense of a special shaped label in order to attract the attention of wine buyers.

While we offer over 800 different label sizes, sometimes to add impact to your labels you want an unusual shape that is unique to you. Obviously this costs extra, because a special die will have to be ordered, but sometimes it will be worth the cost when you can create a striking design that will enhance your products appeal on the shelf.

The labels also create interest with their name and the illustration. The simple drawing is obviously a giraffe but the wines are called "Tall Horse." There is a story behind this that dates back to the early 1800's and a gift of a giraffe from the Sultan of Egypt to the King of France that the French called a tall horse. A good story and a great label design can go a long way towards selling more product and Tall Horse Wine is a great example of that.

Wierd and Wacky Wine Labels

Earlier this month over at Trend Hunter they featured 10 different wines with some of the wackiest names you have ever heard. These all appear to be legitimate wines available for sale from wineries around the world. Here is the list:
1. Cat's Pee on a Gooseberry Bush
2. Vampire
3. Goats do Roam in Villages
4. Ten Minutes by Tractor
5. Rocket Science
6. Seven Deadly Sins
7. Fat Bastard
8. Marilyn Merlot
9. Mad Housewife
10. Cleavage Creek

Wine is often on the cutting edge when it comes to label design and this list goes to show they can also be very innovative when it comes to product names. Some wineries aren't afraid to laugh at themselves if it will help them stand out on the retail shelf.

No word on how good these wines are, although I have had a Fat Bastard Shiraz before and it was excellent. Most of these wines do feature interesting labels that tie together well with the wacky names.

Judging a Wine by its Label

A couple of weeks ago, Mike Carter reported on his Serious About Wine blog about a new study that was published last month in the Journal of Marketing.  Titled "Holistic Package Design and Consumer Brand Impressions", the main finding of the study is that yes, we do in fact judge a wine (and many other products) by its label.

Many studies have been done that have emphasized the importance of the label and packaging in wine and any other retail products, but this study went a step further. It tried to get answers to exactly how we are judging the packaging, and what factors are influencing our judgments.

The authors of the study, two marketing professors (one from Oregon and one from Germany), photographed 160 wine bottles. Then they showed these photos to 125 graphic designers to analyze the aesthetic attributes of each bottle. They sorted the designs into five primary design types: massive (or bold), contrasting, natural, delicate and nondescript. Then they showed the bottles to 268 consumers in Oregon, asking 15 questions about each bottle's brand personality. Not limiting the study to just wine, the researchers repeated the analysis with photos of 120 fragrance bottles.

The results of the study will assist brand managers in selecting or modifying package and label design for achieving desired consumer responses to their products. For example, the label pictured here for Wine by Joe is categorized as a massive design, and people found these designs eye-catching but they expected the product to be lacking in sophistication and to be less expensive.

If you are interested in learning more about this study you can read the full report here.

A Unique Case of Red Wine

At first glance the photo above is nothing unusual - a picture of a dozen bottles of red wine. But if you look at the labels you will see that each label has a slightly different design. These labels are the brainchild of Jeffrey Caldeway, a leading wine label designer in Napa, CA, who created these unique labels for St. Francis Winery's new wine called simply "RED".

RED is a reasonably priced wine aimed at the younger market, so Caldewey decided to do something completely different in order to catch their attention. He created 12 different red paint spatter pattern images for each of the 12 bottles in the case. So on the shelf in the liquor store customers will see different patterns on each bottle. To ensure that there were always 12 different labels in a case these labels had to be printed sequentially and then repeated down the roll so they could be applied to the bottles with their label applicator.

The only way to do this was through digital label printing. Now, to be clear Lightning Labels did not print these labels, but it is such an interesting use of variable image printing that I wanted to mention it here. It is a great example of leveraging digital label printing to enhance a brand. The overall design stays consistent, just one component of the label changes to give each label a unique look. When RED was launched it was ground breaking for the wine industry - no one had done anything like it before.

This is just one idea that you can use to create a truly unique label for your products. In the last issue of our newsletter, the Lightning Flash, I wrote about five product label ideas that can help you break through the clutter at the retail store. With digital label printing there are so many new opportunities for label and packaging designers that simply were not available a decade ago. Forward thinking companies like St. Francis Winery can really differentiate themselves by being one the first companies to leverage this new technology.

The European Wine Label Challenge

The wine labels above are bright, colorful and fun. Unfortunately, we didn't print them, they are Australian wines from the liquor store chain Liquorland. Last month the UK magazine, Design Week, featured these wine labels in an article about wine branding. Basically, they were saying that US and Australian wineries were leaving the Europeans behind with their fun and fresh wine label designs.

I don't think there is any product where the label is more important than in wine. As the article says, people often enter a liquor store with a price range in mind and have no idea what brand they will purchase. The visual appeal of the label can have a huge impact on whether or not a wine is purchased. If you were shopping for a white wine on a hot summer's day and came across the labels above, they would certainly catch your eye.

This is the challenge for anyone, whether it be a European winery or a small company selling soap at Whole Foods. If you want new customers to try your product, you have to have a compelling and visually appealing label.