The Label Tells the Story
To help convey the message that Stratus Vineyards occupies a distinctive, high-end niche in the wine market, the company commissioned designer Michael Vanderbyl to create its label. First, Vanderbyl pondered the company’s name, inspired by a high-atmosphere cloud. The cloud’s areas of light and shadow suggest layers of complexity – an apt metaphor for Stratus’s flagship assemblage wines (complex wines combining several varietals grown on the estate).
Then he selected an image of a stratus cloud with an elongated, lean look. “I accentuated the horizontal,” he recalls. “That’s why the label is so small and wide.” Next, he says, “to reflect the wine’s understated, high-quality approach, we simplified the label by moving all the appellation and legal clutter to the label on the back of the bottle.” The rich look of the duotone-printed cloud image adds yet another subtle distinguishing note. Duotone is a printing process associated with the high-quality reproduction of photography, such as the coffee-table books of Yosemite and Grand Canyon landscapes by Ansel Adams. A printing press can only produce around 50 shades of colour per ink. Superimposing the same pattern, slightly enlarged, in grey greatly increases the range of shades. “Normal black-and-white printing comes off as being very cool,” Vanderbyl says. “Duotone gives a much warmer appearance.”
Stratus, like most Niagara and other New World vintners, has adopted traditional French bottle shapes: high-shouldered Bordeaux for the reds; sloping-shouldered Burgundy for the whites. Keen observers may notice that the labels for these bottles differ as well. “On the red wines, we pushed the labels very high,” Vanderbyl says.
“They are lower on the whites. These are not the usual places where you expect to see the label, which makes the graphic identity seem more sophisticated.”
Vanderbyl also created the label for Wildass, the secondary line from Stratus Vineyards. “The name sounds irreverent. To make it less controversial, we put a little cartouche of a donkey on the label. This makes it clear that we’re talking about the animal jackass, not the human kind.”
Both wines’ labels exemplify Vanderbyl’s convictions about graphic design in this field. “The big failing of most New World wine labels is that they attempt to look like they were meant for a European wine. New World wines, especially Californians, are bold and elegant while European wines, particularly French ones, are subtle. Wine lovers appreciate these differences. Since the wines aren’t the same, the labels shouldn’t look the same. They can respect history without making a bad mimic of it. Having a ‘Ye Olde’ etching of the chateau or pseudo-chateau, if it happens to be a modern building, isn’t what wine-label design is about.”
Michael Vanderbyl founded San Francisco-based Vanderbyl Design in 1973. A design polymath, he creates graphics, packaging, signage, interiors, showrooms, furniture, textiles and fashion apparel. Clients include the Walt Disney Company, Esprit, IBM, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sun Microsystems and leading furniture manufacturers such as Teknion and Baker. In 2000 he was awarded the Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the organization’s highest honour.
