Decorative wine label with painted birds
Vineyards & Wine

Vintage  Design: The Art of the Wine Label

Clever vintners know that how a bottle looks in the 21st century is almost as important as what’s inside—we raise a glass to the modern wine label

To see a gallery of design in all its delicious glory, look no further than your local wine store. Alongside wine labels that have changed little in centuries, you will see Surrealism, photomontage, Constructivism, bold portraiture, capricious illustration, and every kind of typography from tasteful serifs to flamboyant Tuscan fonts. Wine shelves are as graphically vibrant as record stores and bookshops used to be.

Some labels, such as the groundbreaking “electro” labels designed by Xavier Bas for Tomàs Cusiné, are mesmerizing abstract images that draw you in, whispering “drink me” in a seductive Catalan accent. Others, such as Harry Pearce’s text-only labels for centuries-old wine business Berry Brothers & Rudd (BBR), provide the cool reassurance of French wines in an English cellar. Ryan DiDonato’s literal illustrations for Il Palagio, the vineyard co-owned by musician Sting, make a link between wine and nostalgia, while Fernando Gutiérrez’s forthright letterforms for Telmo Rodríguez communicate uncompromising quality.

Wine label with dancing woman in catsuit
Label styles may vary across Il Palagio’s bottles, but all wines are named after songs made famous by vineyard co-owner Sting. Banner image: A design by Xavier Bas for Tomàs Cusiné.

Inform and Inspire

What fills the label space has to work hard—telling you what the wine is, and persuading you to buy it, too. Paula Macfarlane, who for several years designed supermarket wine labels for creative agency Lewis Moberly, says: “The client is always looking to stand out on the shelf, rather than wanting a description of the wine or heritage.”

Wine expert Paul Keers, former editor of GQ, and cofounder of the Sediment blog, notes how wine has become an increasingly mass-market commodity: “That has made labels louder and more garish, relying on humor, loud graphics, and bright colors.” Conversely, upmarket labels rarely think in terms of competing visually. “They know they will be sought out, whereas the mass-market wines are competing for attention on a shelf,” he observes.

A design for Bodega Biniagual by Xavier Bas, one of the foremost label designers in the Catalan area.

“My favorite wine labels are the early Mouton Rothschilds, the artists’ versions,” says Macfarlane. “The use of red to pick out various words or initials within the block of black script or sans-serif type… they are charming.” Others cite the Picasso or Chagall labels for Mouton Rothschild as the gold standard.

Red wine bottle
Known for specializing in signage, exhibition, and packaging design, Fernando Gutiérrez has been creating labels for Telmo Rodríguez for almost 20 years.

Pearce, who works for Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, emphasizes the importance of honoring tradition and longevity in his designs for BBR. “[British supermarket] Waitrose changes design strategy every 18 months; BBR has a 25-year business plan,” he says. BBR’s creative director Geordie Willis continues: “We were keen to bring a sense of place to each label in the same way that great wines express their terroir. We did this by visiting geographically and historically relevant fonts for each wine.” Pearce spent weeks in BBR’s historic cellars on London’s St James’s Street, plus BBR sent him on a wine-appreciation course.

In labels for biodynamic producer Gut Oggau, portraiture is used to convey the personality and character of the wine.

Gutiérrez has been designing for Basque Country’s Telmo Rodríguez for almost two decades. The elegant labels are not literal, but take their cue from conversations about the region, the land, and the sustainable methods of harvesting. Gutiérrez’s earthy colors are reminiscent of the ground from which the vines spring, while his letter Ms—letterpress-printed by Alan Kitching—hint at the artisan winemaking process. “A vineyard is a simple business that works in a very natural way,” observes Gutiérrez. Telmo Rodríguez, he says, “is into the whole culture of wine. We look at how we can communicate the wine, just to do justice to it.”

Such long-term relationships are not unusual. Bas, the doyen of Catalan wine label design since breaking through with Tomàs Cusiné, says he has never lost a client. Design Bridge’s Graham Shearsby has worked with Marqués de Riscal since the brand began 33 years ago, and values the intimacy of their relationship. “Our first meeting [in 1986] was around the family kitchen table eating lamb chops and home-grown broad beans… and a wine from 1924,” he recalls. Design Bridge’s label work also includes a range for Fortnum & Mason and for Château d’Esclans, another relationship that goes back more than 20 years.

Geometric-patterned wine bottle
For Motif Wines, Austrian agency En Garde set out to create a “sixth sense,” transforming the taste and smell of each wine into an eye-catching pattern. Image: En Garde

There is also the business of selling wine to people who know little about wine, as opposed to those who know everything. The Motif Wines range, designed by Austria’s En Garde agency, uses a combination of tasting notes and eye-catching geometrics to entice and educate young drinkers. The wines’ names use dialect terms, such as zslempat and gschniglt (the former means chaotic or immoral; the latter clean and elegant) from the Southern Styrian region of Austria in which the wine is made.

Individual Character

For its southern French wines, Domaine La Louvière engaged Austrian art director Cordula Alessandri and illustrator Florine Glück to make slyly erotic labels which hint that its wines—with names such as Le Libertin and La Séductrice—might be wolves in dandies’ clothing.

Wine label with drawing of a wolf in a suit
Paying homage to regional folklore, wolves take center stage in Domaine La Louvière’s black and white illustrations, which also nod toward eroticism with names such as La Séductrice, part of the vineyard’s “temptations” range, and Le Libertin, in its “pleasures” collection.

Another trend is the use of faces. Design studio Moruba’s labels for Spanish organic winery Matsu feature artisans whose soulful eyes follow you around the cellar. “The faces reflect something of the earthy, authentic quality of the wine,” says Keers. Further examples of “face labels” can be seen in the Romanian Minima Moralia wines, and in the Gut Oggau portraits designed by Jung von Matt: bearded hipster Joschuari for a red and matriarch Mechthild for white, both members of an imaginary family.

Personality and humor undoubtedly work: Pentagram’s labels for BBR’s wholesale wines make spirited use of words, with visual puns such as “One more river to cross,” dizzying typographic cocktails (“Pietas”), and a typewritten poem for “Eternal Return Rosado.”

Red wine bottle
Pared-back typography and visual puns add a modern twist to tradition in labels for centuries-old business Berry Brothers & Rudd.

Some wine labels exemplify Bas’s thoughts about the sector. “Many clients are now more focused on tradition and value than on identity and authenticity,” he says, “which is not so strange if you think about politics in Europe!” He enthusiastically shows off his latest, undeniably “authentic,” label for a new client, who he says is extremely passionate about her land. The small vineyard (Pla de Tudela) is in Salvador Dalí country, near Costa Brava in Catalonia. Bas commissioned UK-based illustrator David Hewitt to fly over and spend three days drawing the landscape. The resulting pencil drawings, spare and appealing, form the basis of an identity design and labels for a new winemaker about to make her mark on the world. “These smaller companies often have very few people working for them, no marketing or advertising,” says Bas, “so we have to think about everything!”