A huge part of the fun in amateur winemaking is the presentation of the wine. I’m of the opinion that if you go to a lot of effort to make the wine then a lot of effort should go in to displaying and presenting it. It’s all part of the fun and, at parties, there’s nothing like showing off a wine that has been properly bottled, corked, labelled and capped by you. It can be a good talking point as people sip on your wine.
Also, a sizable enough percentage of points goes towards your score for presentation if you decide to enter any amateur competitions with it. A few years ago a recipient of one of my bottles entered it into a competition, and what do you know, it won!
So, lets talk about labeling the wine. The general rule is, there are no rules, and you can have as much fun with the labels and names as you want. I had originally thought of going down the route that some commercial wine producers have gone in recent years and use a humourous name or pun for the wine like the New Zealand Vinyard Fairview’s, Goats Do Roam (GROAN!!!) or a really colouful label like Kiona’s The Vivacious Vicky.
Instead, I decided to let the wines speak for themselves and I plumped for a more traditional feel to the label. I used my family crest on the bottle in recognition of the fact that four generations of us have lived in the house. I blogged about the house before and under a different moniker. If you’d like to read the history of it, you can do so here.
So, what do you think?
No no . .go trendoid we have “Third Leg” (dog peeing) “Fat Bastard” (Hippo) “Funny Monkey” (no guesses there) . . seriously we have some really cool labels on pretty awesome wines. Oh of course, “Yellow Tail” with a yellow kangaroo on the label and frankly not a bad drop. Their reds suck but the whites are good. If you must go the crest, do it Billecart Salmon style, silver on black. Very classy . . see, might not know my wines but the designer in me knows a good logo when I see it!
Hi Baino. I had thought about a modern style label. I have a cousin, who’s a graphic artist and he’s working on my Beer labels. The beer is called ‘Badger’s Arse’ and I am going to have humorous labels for those, but unfortunately he’s too busy to do the wine labels so I had a go. I thought the wine deserved a more traditional label and not being very artistic, the only thing I could think of to fill the gap was the crest. Is it possible to change to colours of a family crest without incurring the wrath of the family for generations to come? Anyway, I can’t print silver on the home printer, it just comes out a dull grey.