There are nine bottles on my shelf. I didn’t sort them by colour or appellation. I sorted them by how they look. No wine expert would do it that way. Then again, I’m also a photographer.
A label is the first thing you see. Before you smell anything, before you taste, before you’ve worked out what you think, you look. And a label says something whether it means to or not.
What the big houses do
The big houses know this. Krug has run the same black-and-gold design for decades, and you can pick it out from thirty metres away. Dom Pérignon goes for minimal type on cream paper; it whispers expense instead of shouting about it. Moët & Chandon still clings to the gold-tap design that looked modern back in the seventies.
None of that is accidental. For a big brand, recognition is the value. The wine shifts a little each year. The label never moves.
What the small growers do
Small growers go another way, and sometimes the result is better, sometimes worse. Vouette & Sorbée has a label that looks hand-drawn, all crosshatching and scribbled notes, as if you’re holding someone’s thesis. It tells you the wine came out of the ground somewhere. Bérêche uses clean type on matte paper. Quiet, never flashy, and a good match for the wine inside.
Then there are the labels that tell you nothing. Or worse, the ones that promise something the wine isn’t: floral illustrations on a bone-dry blanc de blancs, slick graphic design on a wine that’s been made the same way for fifty years.
I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly. But it’s a missed chance.
Looking closely
As a photographer I look at composition, at light, at what sits inside the frame and what’s been kept out. A label works the same way, only smaller. Which typeface? Which colour? What earned a place on the paper, and what didn’t? Each choice tells you something about who made the wine and who it’s meant for.
Sometimes I photograph a bottle purely for the label: the way the light catches the paper, the texture of the foil, a vineyard name in small print along the bottom. Not for an article. Just for myself. Looking closely is a habit, and the habit makes you better at wine and at photography both.
A label never lies outright. It edits.