Message in a bottle

Netofa Winery – Wine label design and branding

Netofa Winery was founded in 2007, when it began manufacturing elegant, high quality wines in the old-world fashion. Netofa’s wines boast a delicate body and are defined by complex fragrances and tastes.

Today the winery sells around 120,000 bottles every year, mostly in Israel, France, the USA, Belgium, England, Italy and beyond. Over the last decade, the winery has matured, acquiring knowledge and knowhow related to new species, terrain-types and weather. This process has been relevant to both the interior of the bottle – the wine — as well as its exterior – the bottle, its label, logo and even the winery and its facilities. In parallel to the winery’s ongoing cycle of improvement, the young winery’s staff decided to pursue a no less intriguing rebranding process. With a clear understanding of the complications involved in an industry that merges the old world with the new, Netofa partnered with Itamar Gur from Studio Gur to reconsider its appearance and visual language…

We chose a unique branding approach while taking into account Netofa’s design and logo. The outcome produced an unassuming, pioneering, modern yet classic design, that we hoped would speak to the heart of Netofa’s target audience: secular and religious populations in Israel, Europe and the United States.

The font we used was full yet hollow and did justice to the unorthodox merging of English letters with Hebrew vowels that we employed. For the slogan line, which describes the winery and its geographic region, we chose a more personal font. The language we chose combines light with color to highlight the natural connection between art and wine.

While designing the wine label, we decided that each of the winery’s three series would have its own visual language based on a leading illustration, unique color and a matching font.

For the first series, “Domaine’, the label design was driven by a connection to the physical landscape of the winery itself, while the coloring was determined by the color of the wine inside it. Yellow, orange-pink and red in accordance with the different types of wine in the series: white, rose and red. The label is based on wine paper with flourishes of gold at precise points in the logo and the illustration.

In the second series, Tel Qasset, the label design was focused on an actual person – the winemaker himself. We used an illustration of the winemaker drinking coffee while resting during the harvest to illustrate the human element in the manufacturing process. Here we used wine paper with a yellowish, almost mustard-like coloring. The illustration and design were done in black and we used a bold font for the brand name.

La Tour, the third series, is the winery’s flagship product. The design approach was based on a lookout tower on the Netofa property. The label is wine paper, with a bold silver foil on the brand name and at a specific point on the logo.

The label design for Netofa’s port, Ruby, is characterized by a rendering of the logo’s font into Hebrew. The font works well in both languages. The label is black while the letters are white to form a strong contrast that highlights the brand.

No accounting for taste: Art and Wine

Wine provides a truly immersive experience, one that goes far beyond the wine itself. No less essential to the experience is the bottle and its label. In fact, when a good bottle of wine is placed on the table, a well-designed label quickly becomes the center of attention, transforming the wine drinking experience into something more reminiscent of art.

In 1924 Phillip de Rothschild permanently married art and wine by hiring the most respected artists of the time to design the label of the Chateau Mouton. Indeed, no consumer would dare to argue with the claim that a label designed by Picasso or Warhol contributes to the gourmet experience provided by a wine. In fact, this is the precise reason that all wine labels – from the very best of the best, to the less inspiring labels – put forth an artsy feeling that gives voice to a specific aspect of the winery.

As with all things related to design, there are trends that come and go when it comes to label design. Similar to fashion design, last year’s ‘in’ will always be less popular this year. In art however, there exists a timelessness that is immune to changing trends. Perhaps this is the reason many wineries, in Israel and abroad, tend to decorate their labels with artwork that will never go out of style.

How exactly is wine a type of art? Well, first of all a vintage wine is necessarily a one-off. Each year’s vintage is different from last year’s and from next year’s vintage. Moreover, there is no precise recipe for making wine, and one never knows exactly what the final result will taste, look and smell like. This process is similar to that of an artist’s, who begins each artwork in front of an empty canvas without knowing what the end result will look like.

One-off

A few years ago, Castel Winery decided to merge art and ‘At Risk Youth’. In 2012, the guys at Castel held a wine auction, with all proceeds donated to a local nonprofit focused on helping at risk youth.

The winery staff decided that as part of this endeavor, a select number of artists would design one-off labels for the rare Gran Vin bottles. These bottles were sold to collectors and wine enthusiasts at a gala event held in their honor. The Gran Vin’s original label was designed by the artist Aryeh Azan, who was a close friend of the winery owners, the Ben-Zaken family. Azan drew an illustration of the original Castel winery in Ramat Raziel, and of their new facility in Yad Shmona.

In this project, all the labels incorporated the winery’s branding in their design, however each label differed in the way the artist expressed his own unique style. You might call this whole project a sort of a unique art expo displayed on the bottles of the winery.

Childhood scenery

Jerusalem Winery recently released a limited edition of a new wine by Sam Soroka, who created the wine alongside the artist David Gershtein who handled the artistic side of the process. The end result had each of the five bottles in the edition decorated by one of David Gershtein’s well-known works of art. Gershtein’s studio is located in the Ella Valley (near Beit Shemesh), where he mostly paints the scenes of his childhood: nature, vineyards and grapes.

The designer chose the paintings for the wine label from a huge selection.  In some cases, she decided to incorporate specific parts of a painting for the label. David Gershtein himself is quite proud of the connection between the wine labels and his art. He feels that his paintings add another dimension to the wines: art, color and brushstroke textures.

An art expo on bottles

The Rose wine is decorated by the painting “A Mediterranean Table’, the Guvertmeiner by the painting ‘The Sun’s Flowers’, the Marcellan proudly displays ‘The Tree’s Prayer’, the Muscat shows ‘Glass Tool’ while the Chardonnay is adorned with the painting ‘Summer in the Orchard’. Indeed, the connection is very strong. At the top of each of the five bottles is the winery’s logo, clearly separated from the center label, while the label itself gives the artwork center stage, which commands the attention of the viewer. At the bottom of the bottle one can find the winery’s technical specs on a black background to create contrast.

There’s something about the wine drinking experience that connects us to very specific moments from our lives. A specific moment that is stored away from the host of other memories that make up our lives is made even more memorable because of its art. Art on a limited-edition vintage bottle serves its purpose in conveying a message in the same way any other brand does. A bottle that proudly displays artwork on its label will always be seen in a much more prestigious light than a bottle with ‘simple’ labeling.   Therefore it’s no surprise that for wine enthusiasts and many others, these bottles are considered to be collector’s items.