Judging a Wine by its Label

Let's face it, unless you're an oenophile, label design plays a significant role in how you select your wine in a store. It's easy to think, "Oh, that's an attractive label! It's probably a great wine." And sometimes you're right, but sometimes you're wrong.

Wine labels are the most direct way for wineries to communicate with and market to their consumers. Labels can make a so-so wine seem highly appealing, but a bland label can cause a bottle to be overlooked. We live in a highly visual society, and what your branding looks like matters to consumers.

With this in mind, Wine Access decided to do something a little different this year, we decided to add a label competition to the International Value Wine Awards. If our judges are tasting all these great wines, shouldn't we be looking at how they are presented as well?

The judging panel for our label competition was led by Wine Access Art Director Teresa Johnston.

She was assisted by Hailey Ballinger, a Calgarian who owns Ball Creative, a food packaging design company.

And last but not least, Pierre A. Lamielle rounded out the label competition panel. Pierre is an illustrator and designer who teaches cooking classes at the Cookbook Co. Cooks in Calgary.

When the panel was examining the labels, they started out by asking themselves two general questions:

1. How effectively does the label communicate to the viewer/consumer?
2. How well does it market the brand?

They evaluated the labels within their flights, based on category. For example, they judged a flight of merlots against each other, but kept the overall field of merlots in mind.

They assigned each wine a score out of 10, under 3 different criteria:

1. Brand/varietal recognition
2. Overall originality and creativity
3. Use of typography, graphics and paper stock

The judges strove to look at the wines as entire package. Not just the label, but also the cap and bottle design - how does the overall picture come together? What does it say to consumers?

The primary round of label judging took place on the Sunday before the start of the competition. The judges used this round to cull the group, and they will examine close ups taken by our official photographer in order to declare their winners.

The results of the label competition will be included in the October/November 2010 issue of Wine Access, along with the results of the IVWA blind tastings. Teresa Johnston expects that there will be best labels chosen from each category of wine, an overall top 10 list, and one label chosen as the best overall.