Eccentric Wine Label Design for Deuce Double Barrel Chardonnay
Deuce winery create their wines only from the best vintages when no compromises are made. They always think out of the box and sometimes this means they go completely crazy. And what else could one like me possibly do with a crazy wine and crazy winemakers – of course nothing by creating an eccentric wine label design.
The Double Barrel chardonnay is probably one of my best examples for this.
It is not just one of the many barrel fermented chardonnays. It is something much more special and intriguing. They used 2 types of barrels to make this wine – first they started with new American barrels and then continued with Kentucky Bourbon barrels. This is how the name Double Barrel came.
When I realized how interesting and non-traditional this technology is I was 100% decided to make an eccentric wine label design and somehow try to capture the uniqueness of the wine and embody it in my work. I did not have much time to think as the idea suddenly came to me and it was very simple and clear. As I have already known it was going to be an eccentric design, I decided to turn my new label upside down so you have to rotate the whole bottle to see what is written on the label. This was my initial idea and after that I decided to create on my iPad an unique lettering for the Double Barrel title, which, as you could see on my photos, is the only thing that could be normally read from the whole label without any need to do extra efforts.
Hand lettering is one of my top specialties and I started making attempts to create more and more interesting lettering style. After a number of tries I finally decided to use my own hand writing with sign-painters brush in Procreate app. I have very legible handwriting and the brush tool added even more personality to its final look. After I did the lettering I continued my work on the label. Double Barrel meant ALL BLACK to me. I used the original DEUCE wine label, rotated it 180 degrees and made it all black.
I preserved the Constellation Jade Raster paper as it is one of my favorite papers and I could write a book about how to use it best. I replaced the gold hot foil stamping with black foil and to reproduce the black linear patter on the background from the original label I used 2 black inks overprinted and eventually my eccentric wine label design obtained two different blacks so we started calling it the triple black label.
I love the idea of using three different layers of black in one image as it resulted in very solid yet complex black background. It was the perfect canvas for my Double Barrel title and this time I decided to use Silk foil printing because I wanted to have high level of embossing combined with tasty gold.
When I saw the label printed I knew it was going to be one to remember.
We had a long conversation with the winery what bottle to use and finally decided to pick the Celeste bottle by Saverglass which is a bit higher level than the one we used before. The sealing is done with premium cork and then we dipped the bottle in black wax.
The final result was an appealing yet serious bottle with very eccentric wine label design and shining hand lettered Double Barrel title in gold. The wine photoshoot I did myself was real fun like the whole creative process before.
I am very optimistic we’ll have more interesting and even extraordinary wines by Deuce Winery very soon that will surely unlock my creativity and maybe have even better and bolder ideas for new eccentric packaging.
Credits:
Client: Lalo Geshev & Nikolay Kolev
Design: the Labelmaker
Brand Creation: Jordan Jelev
Bottle: Celeste by Saverglass
Paper: Constellation Jade Raster by Arconvert
Photo: Jordan Jelev
