The Hell of It

One of the many elements of my job is to handle our labels. From the look, feel, content and government requirements to descriptions and working with the printer, labels have a lot of details to cover. Usually it comes together easily, other times it is a real pain and the worst part is if after all that work, time and effort, they are printed, the wine is released, and there is an error. I have literally cried several times over labels.

Two of our wines have specialty labels, they are the Divino and Diavolo red wine blends. They are always released as a pair (one is lighter than the other in body style, think Pinot Noir compared to a Cabernet, skim milk to heavy cream) and the artist for the label changes each year. We call them our Heaven and Hell Artist series and they are some of our most popular. They are also some of the most challenging.

Each year, we get submissions from artists to consider their art for our labels, some are easy to see would be perfect for us and others not so much. The art needs to reflect who we are as a winery; what our branding has been. The art needs to be significantly different than the art that was on the label for the last 2 years because wine shops and restaurants will still have a previous vintage of these wines in stock and it gets very confusing very quickly if the art is similar. They need to be sophisticated and look extremely classy as these are also our most expensive wines. And finally, they need to work with the Heaven and Hell theme, what does Heaven and Hell look like to the artist and will customers connect to that? On our very 1st vintage, after all of these considerations, all the planning, all the details, they were printed and didn't fit on the bottle. There were a lot of tears that day.

The current vintage of labels we are working on are some of the hardest yet. A fabulous artist submitted work 3 different times in order to try to find that sweet spot we are looking for, however, after all these years, navigating these waters are more complicated than ever. As the art continued to raise debates among the 4 of us owners, we realized the clock was ticking and we need those labels done ASAP for the wine's late fall release. We needed to shelve this artist so we could lend more time to finding the right pieces and find someone new STAT. Luckily we have a list of artists excited to work with us so jumping down the list is the easy part. Telling the artist we needed to shelf his label for now, was the hardest thing to do. Squashing his electric enthusiasm over this project felt physically painful. This vintage label isn't even done yet and I'm about to cry.

It isn't easy to pull the plug on something that isn't working when you've put so much effort into it, but sometimes, the way to avoid crying is to make those difficult decisions. So, here we go, from scratch with zero time to waste.

Man, mama needs a drink!

-Cheers from the Vivác Winery Family!
www.VivacWinery.com