Best foot forward: wine design and packaging
We live in contradictory times. Many of the latest technological developments focus on ways to speed things up, in order to quicken the pace of our already frantic lives.
New apps and websites are gearing their businesses towards making life easier for cash-rich, time-poor consumers, from doing their laundry to having their favourite meal delivered to their door. Articles have been condensed down to blogs, then to 140-character Tweets, and have since shrunk to a single captioned picture on Instagram as easy-to-digest images win out over words.
But while we seem obsessed with speeding up the pace of our everyday existence, at the same time we’re winding back the clock and have become fanatical about provenance, and keen to spend our hard-earned cash on brands with integrity that are crafting authentic products with a story to tell. You’ve only got to look at the number of drinks brands that have gone down the vintage route with their packaging to see how far forward the trend for looking back has gone.
Authenticity and beards
“At the moment it’s all about authenticity and beards and pretending to craft like the Victorians. I saw designers working on a copper growler in the studio today – how’s that for 19th century?” jokes Kevin Shaw, owner of drinks packaging design agency Stranger & Stranger. “Millennials play it surprisingly safe with their brand choices. Given their transient worlds, they want products that are rooted in truth.”
So how are drinks brands navigating these unchartered watersin which consumers simultaneously want things as quickly and conveniently as possible, yet demand that the products they do buy are trustworthy, unique and ideally boast an interesting story?
A number of technological and design developments have emerged in the drinks world over the last few years to respond to the needs of today’s capricious consumers, many of which aim claim to offer shortcuts that allow you to press the fast-forward button on wine’s ageing process and enjoy instant gratification.
The rewards of patience don’t seem to concern millennial consumers (those born between 1980 and 2000), who want things done yesterday if not before.
“People don’t stay brand loyal like they used to – there’s too much choice out there. The millennial mindset is all about discovery,” says Abigail Pitcher of drinks packaging design agency Barlow Doherty. She adds: “I believe in a Marmite approach to design. Drinks brands should pitch confidently to their target market and be unafraid of alienating certain audiences – bland is forgettable, bold is memorable.”
Smart thinking
Last November Harrods started selling a ‘smart’ decanter called the iSommelier for £1,299, which claims to use patented oxygenation technology to reduce decanting time from hours to minutes.
Made by Bordeaux-based start-up iFavine, the iSommelier allows users to operate the device from an app that offers a number of different aeration settings. While the appeal for wealthy wine buffsis evident, it’s a rather sad sign of the times that there is a market for this kind of gadget, implying that people are too impatient to wait the couple of hours needed to give their Mouton ’82 enough breathing space to perform.
Pitcher is sceptical about the gadget, believing it to be aimed at “people with more money than sense”. Phil Joyce of design agency Purple Creative is equally unconvinced. “Doesn’t it ruin some of the magic? Part of the joy of fine wine is how painstaking the process was,” he says.
Another device keen to disrupt wine’s natural production process is the Wine Grenade, which claims to be able to speed up the ageing process of red wine from two years to six months via speedy micro-oxygenation. Created by a quintet of students from Auckland University after they secured NZ$100,000 (£49,000) in funding, the ‘grenade’ is being aimed at small producers who may not be able to afford to age their reds in barrel, and promises to deliver a similar effect.
By the glass
One toy for impatient wine lovers that has won universal praiseis the Coravin, which has changed the game in the on-trade, making many rare gems available by the glass for the first time. Used with equal enthusiasm at home and in restaurants, the device, which allows users to pour out single glasses of their prized wines without the danger of them oxidising through the use of argon gas, is arguably the most important technological development to have hit the wine world in the last few decades.
It will be fascinating to see whether Coravin creator Greg Lambrecht manages to pull off what he’s promising – similar technology but for sparkling wines, which remains his “absolute priority”, but also “one of the hardest things [I’ve] ever done”. The kit is currently at the trial stage, but given the original Coravin took 11 years to develop, it could be a while before we’re enjoying vintage Krug served by the sip through a needle.
Taking the concept of wine preservation a step further, this March saw the launch of the world’s first ‘smart’ wine bottle, Kuvée, which promises to keep wine fresh for 30 days. The Wi-Fi-connected black bottle has a touchscreen on which users can learn more about the California wine brands on sale with the device, from Bonny Doon to Schug. The wines come housed in metal canisters that slot into the bottle, whose patented valve system prevents oxygen from creeping in for up to a month. “The US wine industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, but it has been slow to innovate beyond the glass bottle and cork,” says Kuvée founder Vijay Manwani.
Keen to keep ahead of the curve, whisky brand Johnnie Walker recently released a smart bottle incorporating Thin Film technology that allows brand owner Diageo to track each bottle’s movements through the supply chain in a bid to tackle the increasing problem of fakes.
Consumers who read the unique tag on the back of the bottle with their mobile will be sent tailored content, like cocktail recipes, making the benefits of the technology for Diageo two-fold. Helen Michels, global innovation director at Diageo, claims the smart bottle “sets the bar for technology innovation in the drinks industry”. Shaw of Stranger & Stanger isn’t so sure.
“There will be lookalikes soon. The best protection in the world is only six months ahead of the hackers and that’s barely enough time to ship bottles to shelves,” he warns. Barlow Doherty’s Pitcher is intrigued by the idea. “It’s an exciting development, and is very much needed in China, but it does all feel a bit Big Brother,” she says of the all-seeing technology.
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Both Shaw and Pitcher are scathing about QR codes, which have threatened to be the next big thing in wine for the last few years but have failed to take off. “QR codes were dead on arrival – they were too much work for too little reward,” says Shaw. Pitcher agrees, citing their ugliness on the back label as their main pitfall. “We’ve designed wine bottles with QR codes on the back and have since been asked to take them off,” she reveals.
The wrong code?
This may not be music to Champagne house Krug’s ears. It has given each bottle of its flagship fizz, Grande Cuvée, an ID code on the back label that can be entered on the Krug website by consumers to reveal more about their bottle, from the vintages that make up the blend to the bottling date, disgorgement date – even a suggested music match to enhance the drinking experience.
Back to basics
Going against the grain, Veuve Clicquot has gone back to basics with its latest packaging innovation in the Naturally Clicquot range – a biodegradable gift box made from residual grape waste left over from the winemaking process.
The grape skins are dried and milled into a flour-like powder, then mixed with water and natural fibres for the production of a recyclable paper. Each of the four sides of the box boasts a different sketch, including a breakdown of how the packaging was made.
Veuve claims the gift pack is capable of keeping a bottle of Yellow Label cool for up to two hours. In 2013 the house released its first tranche of eco-packaging made with a potato base.
Like Johnnie Walker’s smart bottle, the ID codes also allow Krug to keep track of each bottle, though the house has cleverly focused talk of the codes around providing curious consumers with more information on their painstakingly made Champagne. Keeping one foot in the past, Johnnie Walker has entered the craft conversation, teaming up with cobbler Oliver Sweeney on a bespoke pair of brogues that can hide a Red Label miniature in each heel. Priced at £295, the twist on Sweeney’s traditional Oxford brogue, made from premium calf leather, proves both parties have a sense of humour and are willing to have fun while also making a serious statement about what their brands stand for.
As for what lies ahead, at ProWein in March, Concha y Toro-owned wine brand Frontera was showing off its latest marketing trick – a 360° virtual reality tour of one of its vineyards complete with floating lanterns and a midnight feast. Immersive and enveloping, it was an impressive effort that hints at exciting ways the drinks trade might embrace the technology in the future.
However, Pitcher of Barlow Doherty isn’t convinced that Brits will naturally take to the virtual world. “Americans won’t mind putting on a headset but the British psyche is different. People won’t want to do it at their local Waitrose for fear of looking silly, so producers will have to choose their environment wisely,” she warns. Shaw of Stranger & Stranger enjoys the time travel aspect of VR, but says that a recent virtual tour of a distillery felt bland as you couldn’t smell the whisky or the wood, and there were no chances to ask questions or take selfies. He predicts the next big thing will be moving images on labels like the newspapers in the Harry Potter films.
Doherty, meanwhile, thinks augmented reality could take off in drinks packaging if designers can get around the problem of working on a curved surface. Who can forget the moment four years ago when Dom Pérignon’s chef de cave, Richard Geoffroy, appeared as a hologram in five major capital cities at the ambitious launch of the house’s 2003 vintage, which simultaneously took place in London, Hong Kong, Paris, New York and Tokyo?
Fast forward to 2016 and Château Haut-Bailly has just put its name to a bespoke circular wine bottle designed specifically for use in space as liquid gathers into spheres in zero-gravity to minimise the amount of its surface in contact with air.
But while innovation is paramount in order to move any industry forward, it’s heartening that wine plays the long game. It selfishly takes its time, and devout drinkers have to wait for its optimum moment. This might sound whimsical, but there’s magic in wine’s alchemy, and the fact that it’s a living thing, always evolving while it lies on its side for years, decades, and sometimes centuries.
Worth waiting for
As life speeds up to a dizzying degree, and all elements of our lives become increasingly commoditised and disposable, wine remains one of the few things worth waiting for, and it should be given the time and respect that it’s due rather than being tampered with by technology. We look at screens most of our working day – wine should provide an escape from our wired worlds, rather than becoming part of them.
There’s something comforting about the fact that a bottle of wine looks the same today as it did centuries ago, and while the likes of Coravin provide a clever way of making the most of liquid treasures, many of the latest innovations seem to strip wine of its soul, proving how difficult it is to successfully unite the ancient and the modern.
