Bad Labels = Bad Wine?
It's just a working hypothesis, but I'm beginning to think that the design quality of the label on the bottle is a good indicator of the taste quality of the wine in the bottle.
Here in the Northwest there is an abundance of small and undercapitalized wineries. Often, the people who own these wineries also have their own particular ideas of what constitutes good marketing, branding, and design imagery, and since it's their dollars, they insist on creating their own vision of a wine label. How else to account for the presence of a black and white dancing dragon on one label, or a mini-skirted lass suggestively astride a wine barrel on another label--let alone wines with brand names such as "Missionary, "Dominatrix," "Virgin," "Foreplay," and--yes, these are all for real--"Penetration"? One wonders where the TTB is on names such as these.
Interestingly, most of the wines that sport these tasteless (whether design tasteless or message tasteless) labels turn out to be big losers in blind tastings . . . though they are undoubtedly big winners at food and wine shows (can't you just hear the dudes laughing over their bottle of Penetration as they "taste" the wine at any of the raucous "wine and food" festivals around the Northwest?).
Some badly designed labels are sincere: they reflect an owner's desire to express a brand image with little financial resources to execute the design and no real ability to understand that the design they have is so poorly done as to turn off a large segment of potential buyers. With all else being equal on the wine shop shelves, the wine label that looks the best will attract more buyers at the expense of the label that looks bad--but some owners have neither the resources nor knowledge to create a label design of competitive quality.
But other labels are so purposefully designed to appeal to questionable tastes that I wonder whether the owners have any interest in wine at all. Rather, they have figured out a marketing scheme that attracts prurient attention, gets people drunk enough to not care whether the wine is any good or not, and to giddily think the overt sexual innuendo is "fun" and "cute." In the end these wineries sell a lot of wine. . . wine that in my tasting experience is substandard . . . so why should the wineries care that their marketing is crass--they're making money.
There's a market for everything, even vulgarity.
Anyone who knows me knows I am no prude (far from it!), but using bad taste to sell bad wine offends me.
