You can sell a wine by its label

Wines & Vines, March, 1999 by Larry Walker

At one time, and not so very long ago, wine labels were simply a means of identifying the wine. No one ever gave much thought to changing the design of a label, except maybe the vintage date and even that was most often put on a separate neck label. The label was the label and that was that.

Now, the wine label is one of the most important tools a wine marketer has. Sutter Home learned this recently, according to Public Relations Director Stan Hock.

"About four or five years ago, we were starting to lose a little market share on our white Zinfandel," Hock said. "We did some focus group studies and found that when people bought the wine to drink at home, they still bought Sutter Home. But when they bought wine to take to a friend's house for dinner, they were more likely to buy a wine they thought looked more upscale, like Beringer."

At the time, Sutter Home was still selling wine in the standard green bottle and the label was much the same as it had been for years. "We had been doing some incremental refinements to the basic label, but at that point, we decided that maybe we really needed to take a radical step with the label and with the bottle," he said.

The decision was made to put the wine in a clear bottle to allow the attractive color to show. "We went through several creative rounds exploring labeling options with production people and designers. Finally, we decided to go with a pressure sensitive label. We felt that with pressure sensitive, we could create a much more striking look. The combination of the clear bottle and the pressure sensitive really created the effect we were looking for."

Sutter Home introduced the new package in the fall of 1995 and in 1996, sales were up 24%. "We can't say it was just the packaging, there were other things involved. But we started getting more prime end aisle displays and I think it was based on the appeal of the label and overall package," Hock said.

He said that two years ago, they went through the same process at Montevina, changing the bottle shape and the label.

It seems that most label redesign is toward pressure sensitive labels, or PS. But according to Lynn Penner-Ash, the wine-maker at Rex Hill Vineyards in Oregon, the move from glue-based labels to PS isn't something to take lightly.

Rex Hill's New Label

When Rex Hill decided to do a new label last year, the decision was made to go with PS because Penner-Ash thought the technology gave a cleaner look and offered more options in design.

"Overall, I'm happy with the new label," she said. "But I would warn people that they really need to do their homework. It took us much longer to do than we thought it would and there are things we thought we could do that we couldn't do. We worked with a good designer, Kathryn Havens in Napa, Calif., which helped, but there were still problems to work out." Cost was not one of the problems, she said. "I think we came out about even."

Havens, who does almost entirely wine label design, said more than half of her clients were now using PS labels. "I've been seeing a lot more in the past two years, especially when people do a redesign."

She said there were some things that a designer needed to be aware of when doing a PS design. "The color situation is improving, but there has been in the past a problem with colors bleeding. I think the process is not as exact as a flat bed press. Another problem that is getting better is paper selection for PS. There simply isn't the range of paper available, although printers are becoming better at getting good papers," she said.

"One thing that PS has really opened up is label shapes, opening up the possibility of non-traditional shapes, putting holes in labels or lining up several small labels together."

The Cost Question

Tom Todd of O'Dell Printing in Rohnert Park, Calif., who responded to questions in a Wines & Vines survey of wine industry printers, said cost can be a factor. "Small quantities of pressure sensitive labels are very expensive. Only in large quantities do prices even compare and even then they are more expensive. The quality capabilities of sheet fed offset printing far outweigh the ease of use benefits of pressure sensitive," he said.

Todd also sees "a strong adherence to traditional label design" even though newer labels with "wild designs and bright colors can attract attention."

Christine Hanna said the switch to PS at Hanna Winery was made in response to the difficulty of having their die cut label positioned properly. "The technology for pressure sensitive has come a long way," she said. "Cost was a big hit at first, but now we feel we do have better quality. We were also about to spend a lot of money to upgrade the bottling line so when we made the change, we decided to start using a mobile bottling operation and created more room for barrel storage."

Hanna's non-standard geometric shaped label was printed by McCoy Label, Petaluma, Calif. Dan Welty of McCoy estimates that some 400 of the nation's 1,600 wineries now use pressure sensitive labels. He calculates that, on average, a PS label costs about 20% more than glue applied. However, wineries should factor in the fact that the cost of a PS labeler is less and maintenance and labor costs are less. Welty added that for those large wineries that make infrequent label changes with a simple label-to-bottle application and have labor available for glue cleanup are less likely to want PS labels.