This is the third post of a 4 part series where previously, I discussed the Port of Leonardtown Winery’s first year labels, and our customers demographics. In this post, I discuss the new label brand categories and their design. The last post will discuss the changes we made to the back of the labels.

In my post, “Local Wines from Local Vines,” I discussed how our wine portfolio expanded from the original 8 to 11 wines. We needed to divide the wines into a series, but the question was, “in what way?” In reviewing the different possibilities, I proposed to the winemaker that we divide the portfolio into 4 categories:

• Single Variety Labels: Wines bearing a single grape variety name, such as Vidal Blanc or Cabernet Franc.
• Lifestyle Labels: These are fun, light-hearted wines.
• Specialty Labels: Wines that are different in character, such as our Chambourcin Rosé wine or our McIntosh Run Apple Wine.
• Premium Labels: These are our serious wines, such as our 1634 and our Cabernet Franc Reserve.

He agreed with these categories and I set about devising the brand design for each category, with a goal of being able to easily tell each wine from the other.

Single Variety Wine Labels

For the Single Variety Labels, I wanted to show a progression in the wines’ scale—in terms of light-to-heavy body and dry-to-sweet. Our winemaker ordered the red and white wines for me and I devised a color strategy using an analogous color scheme. Here is the red single variety labels. The colors progress from red to red-purple to a deep purple.

White single labels progress less dramatically, using yellows. The white labels may be adjusted next year, since we did not receive a press proof and most find the white wine label analogous color scheme not as distinguishable as they could be. Always insist on a press proof, no matter how pressed for time!

Lifestyle Wine Labels

I wanted the Lifestyle labels to really stand out. I discussed early how our customers loved these certain wines—especially the Breton Bay series—and felt these wines were “their wines.” I wanted to celebrate the Southern Maryland lifestyle, highlighting our wines as part of a healthy, active, outdoors lifestyle. I thought illustrations would be a great way to suggest to our customers to “bring us along!” on their adventures. I love the graphic style of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) posters for America’s parks. These posters were created by the Federal Art Program (the visual branch of the WPA)  during the 1930-40s. I think each poster makes its subject matter iconic, accessible and grand. It seemed the perfect style for these labels.

I’m proud of the Captain’s Table label, in particular. The wine’s name was inspired by the “Port of Leonardtown Winery” and our riverboat logo theme. I thought most of our decision-makers would want a river-boat illustration reference, but walking the riverboat theme is a fine line with me. How do I convey a “captain’s table” without being overly precious with the theme? My vineman brainstormed options with me on the way back from the vineyard one weekend and when Ger suggested an Adirondack chair with a side table beside it, overlooking water, we knew we had a hit! I thought it was a wonderful addition to our water-based Breeze and Shoals and I especially love it in a moonlit setting. The paddlewheel suggesting a moon came about since I wanted to keep with the “paddlewheel” symbol in each illustration, but didn’t what to repeat the symbol as a sun or clouds.

Specialty Wine Labels

After deciding on using a WPA illustration-style for the Lifestyle labels, I turned to another source of inspiration for me: vintage fruit and vegetable labels. I thought the deep, jewel-like saturated colors would be extremely attractive to our customers and help to distinguish one wine from the other. For our Chambourcin Rosé, I was sure to use the deep blue with red paddlewheel symbol. I read KISSmetric’s True Colors —Break down of Color Preference by Gender and wanted to make sure men would be as comfortable in purchasing the Chambourcin Rosé as women. I think I did okay—I hear many oo’s when people see these labels.

Premium Wine Labels

Due to customer response to our 1634 and Autumn Frost premium wine labels, we decided to keep the same look and feel. We used a premium paper and embossed + gold foil stamped the name. It looks fluid and elegant and conveys the worth of the wine inside. Overtime, we will adjust the size of the 1634 so it matches the new size, which is a bit more narrow and longer. We will also gold foil stamp the paddlewheel/water line (which I sometimes refer to as the vine love knot—it reminds me of the dried grape vine tendrils that are often left on the cordon wires).

In my next post, I’ll discuss the updates to the wine label backs. I’m really proud of them! Please let me know what you think. Your feedback is much appreciated.

In this post, I discuss our Port of Leonardtown Winery core customer demographics, their lifestyle, and how I worked to reflect their values in our brand series structure design.

What do our customers want us to be?

I spent that first summer of Sundays pouring in the tasting rooms and at our wine festivals and I discussed our wine with our customers—asking them questions, really listening to what they liked and their reactions to our winery experience. I delved into the Southern Maryland community—the regional foods, recreation and a little bit of the history. In positioning our brand, I wanted to not only tell the wine’s story, but also give an impression of Southern Maryland Experience. My experience tells me our customers want accessible, easy to drink wines that reflect who they are. Our Breton Bay Breeze and Shoals are often bought for the sheer novelty of the bay’s name—“that’s our wine!” was a line I heard often that summer. In assisting our customers with their tasting experience, I found that once the customers taste all of our wines, they often find many of our other wines to be “their wines,” too.

Who are those customers?

Insights from Facebook and informal tasting room comparisons found that our core consumers match what is happening in rest of the states (based upon a Nielsen briefing at Wineries Unlimited). Our core consumers are local women and men of a certain age who buy wine for consumption that evening. Other core consumers are upcoming Millennial age group. Hispanics will figure heavily in our future, as well. We wanted to make sure each group felt at home with our wines, playing up our “local wines from local vines” theme; making the labels more vibrantly colorful and making use of new technology, such as QR codes as much as possible.

How do we reflect what they want in our branding?

Like all identifiable regions, Southern Marylanders have a regional cuisine based upon the bounty of their geographical area. In Southern Maryland, that means Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham, crabs and all sorts of seafood, plus barbeque, barbeque, and barbeque! Southern Marylanders enjoy outdoor recreation on both land and water and often its hard to separate the recreation from the cuisine. So many Southern Marylanders pier fish and crab for not only recreation, but also to get the food on the table for enjoyment. Water sports and biking are big in Southern Maryland and we like to promote that, too. Our winery sits amidst a park with a kayak and canoe launch and a bird sanctuary close by. We are dedicated to promoting a responsible wine lifestyle—one where wine is part of a active lifestyle and enjoyed with meals or simply in the kitchen, on a patio, the water, or wherever family and friends are found.

How do we organize our wines into a branded series? What stays and what goes?

When the wine portfolio expanded from the original 8 to 11 wines, it was obvious that the first year’s color scheme of “white wines are this color and red wines are that color” was too simplistic. We needed to divide the wines into a series, but the question was, “in what way?” Since we are in our second year of production and operation, we were working with the same modest label production budget. That meant that high-end label production values would not be possible. The labels needed to be paper-based without much die creation (dies are used for special purposes, for example: custom shaped labels or embossed/raised letters or graphics).

What remains.

Since we received so many positive comments regarding our premium black labels with gold lettering, we knew we could keep let the premium series stand. We also liked using our logo’s riverboat “paddlewheel” spiral as a a large graphic element in the design. Keeping the names of the wines in the type font, “Largo” conveyed a accessible, country-like flavor to the design. The font also worked well with the other fonts used, like “Trajan” for the name “Port of Leonardtown Winery”

In my next post, I discuss and show the new branding series structure!

This is the first post in a 3 part series. I discuss our first year’s labels and the challenges faced in devising a branding series structure that would be flexible enough to grow with our winery.

The Challenge:

Create a branded wine series structure for the Port of Leonardtown Winery cooperative that reflects the winery’s personality and is flexible enough to accommodate the winery’s growth.

The Winery and First Year’s Labels

The Port of Leonardtown Winery is a developing winery cooperative that opened its doors to the public in May, 2010, serving their first vintage from the 2009 harvest and crush. That first year was a melee of determining which wines would be made, crafting the wines, deciding the names of the wines, putting in place price structures and preparing for opening day. Once the wines were determined and named there was very little time to design and secure TTB approval before bottling. It was decided to keep the initial branding simple: white wines would have one color scheme and reds would have another. Premium wines would feature a black label and gold lettering.

The First Year Label Issues

While there were many positive comments about the label design, we also received valuable feedback from our customers and tasting room staff. Both wanted to see more colorful designs. The tasting room staff mentioned that it was difficult to distinguish from the 6 different non-premium wines when pulling them from the racks to create box sets for the customers. In addition, the winemaker announced that we would be expanding our wine portfolio from 8 wines to 11 or more. The need to create a flexible, branded series structure became obvious.

The Current Port of Leonardtown Wine Portfolio

The winery’s portfolio consists of single variety wines—like Chardonnay, Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin—both white and red and ranging in tastes from dry to sweet. There are also several white and red, dry to sweet blended wines. In addition, the winery will be offering a rosé wine and a fruit (apple) wine. The premium Chardonnay and dessert wines will be offered again and this year, a premium red wine will be added. There are many ways the wines could be structured.

The Second Year and Determining Our Voice

The first year was instrumental in figuring out the winery’s voice and what made the winery unique. The strength and the challenge of working in a winery cooperative is the amount of different voices and opinions involved. All of the board members come from different backgrounds and experiences, but many of the cooperative members are new to the concept of brand development. While it is important to make sure that board members felt their voices were heard, it is also important to reach board consensus. In order to facilitate decision making, the board set up a marketing team. We have several marketing veterans with plenty of experience, so having the marketing team made selling the brand structure concept a much easier and quicker process than the previous year. From our experiences and our customer feedback, we had a much better understanding of not only our voice, but of how our customer’s perceived us—which we felt was much more important! That’s also a strength of our winery cooperative. Its not just one owner’s ego or voice involved. Since there are so many cooperative voices, its easy to turn the branding conversation around from “who are we?” to “what do our customers want us to be?”

In our next post, I discuss our who makes up the Port of Leonardtown Winery core customer demographics, what type of lifestyles they have and how I worked to reflect them in our brand series structure design.