Labels for a wine shop that started bottling its own

Low Tide had sold other people’s wine for fifteen years when the owners started buying casks direct and bottling under their own name. The first labels were made in a word processor and printed at a copy shop, and every wine looked different.

They wanted labels that looked like a range, on a budget that allowed for a few hundred bottles at a time.

One frame, many wines

Small producers cannot afford a new label design for every wine. We designed a fixed frame instead: the shop’s name across the top, a large number for the cask, the grape and place in the middle, and a band at the bottom that changes colour with the style of wine.

Every element has a fixed position and size, so a new label is a matter of filling in fields. The owners made their seventh label themselves, in the template, during the last week of the project.

Tested on a bottle

Labels look different on a curved bottle under shop lights than they do flat on a screen. We printed both routes on four paper stocks and stuck them on real bottles, then stood them on the shop’s shelves for a Saturday. The textured stock that looked best in the studio scuffed in the delivery boxes, so the range uses a smoother, wet-strength paper.

Small runs

Runs of 300 labels rule out most special finishes. We kept one: a single foil for the cask number, which the printer could apply on a short run without a new die for each wine.