Whimsical wines: a wine's packaging is meant to inform and entice, but what do shocking labels and screwcaps convey?

The business of wine merchandising isn't a modern invention. The famous Bordeaux classification of 1855 was simply an opportunity to place Bordeaux chateaux in front of the world's tourists and potential buyers. They were grouped in price categories for convenience and those price categories form the basis for perceived quality today: Is it a coveted First Growth or a lowly Fifth Growth?

Before the 20th century, wines were sold based upon their acclaim among the aristocracy. Napoleon loved Chambertin, so every other winery within sight of the vineyard appended the word Chambertin to its name. Instead of being known as the wine "Gevrey" from the town of the same name, both the town and the wine changed their names to Gevrey-Chambertin.

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French kings drank champagne to celebrate their coronation in Reims, the capital of Champagne. Reims was the site of coronations because historically, many battles were fought in the area. After lopping off your enemy's head and placing the bloody crown on your own, you'd likely ask for the first drink available, which was champagne. It remains the drink of celebration today, associated with victory, prestige and wealth.

Indeed, associations with greatness have driven the success of various wines throughout history. Tokaji, Vin Santo or Constantia were renowned because a royal somewhere was consuming them at court. Even in the 20th century, Winston Churchill famously drank a bottle of Pol Roger in bed every morning. Pol Roger's Cuvee Winston Churchill enjoys that reflected glory today.

ANIMAL ATTRACTION

While some American wine buyers might embrace a brand because Brad, Jennifer or J Lo are pictured drinking it in the pages of a magazine, others seek out the endorsements of a half dozen wine writers, believing wines must be anointed by one or two wine press entities in order to succeed.

Even many restaurant professionals allow the critical wine press to determine which wines appear on their menu and which should not sully their award-winning wine programs. These restaurateurs sell themselves short. The vast majority of the wine-buying public has no idea which wines are well-reviewed. Instead, they know a few names, like the sound of others and are easily swayed by a passionate server or an intriguing label.

Witness the critters on parade at your local wine shop. With so many new wine labels sporting animals, it's easy to forget that it's not a new idea. Labels from the 1970s and 1980s trod the same ground: Stag's Leap, Frog's Leap, Girard's Blue Jay, Otter Spring, Eyrie Vineyards and, well, does anyone remember Cold Duck, or its progenitor, the Canadian "Baby Duck?"

Today's shelves house a veritable menagerie: Two Moose, Jindalee, Smoking Loon, Black Swan, Kangaroo Ridge, Bad Dog, Big Moose, Thirsty Lizard, King Fish, Little Penguin, Dancing Bull and the ubiquitous kangaroo, Yellow Tail. And I thought Yellow Tail was a kind of sushi. Some of the labels are cute, most are smart and attractive. While many of these wines' bottle graphics seem to emanate from the same label studio (and that's not too far from the truth), all these marketers grasp one important element: They are marketing to people who are not sure which wine to buy.

These labels appeal to wine beginners, but does that make them less serious? What other choices confront the wine buyer? What information is available on a typical wine label? Strange foreign names, unknown varieties and appellations, and back labels that provide such over-generalized advice that they may as well read that a particular wine is "an ideal accompaniment to shellfish, sauteed fish, grilled fish, duck, turkey, goose, pork, lamb, beef, oxen, boar, stews and live game."

Wine labels fail to provide the one piece of information customers need: what the wine tastes like. Failing that, the buyer looks at the label in order to decide if it's sexy, fun and humorous or exhibits other attributes survey respondents indicate deem a vintage worthy of purchase.

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SELLING THE SIZZLE 

For the wine intelligentsia, this suggests a sad state of affairs. Indeed, recent articles have decried this as wine "sold for its shock value," as one well meaning but old fogey of a wine writer put it.

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Chill out, old man. Silly labels are no more harmful than screwcaps, tetra-paks and quality wine in bag-in-box packaging. Old school wine labels appeal to old school wine buyers; newbies want to be enticed by something else. It has always been thus.

And it would appear that all these unseemly labels and packages are helping wine's cause. Wine has steadily increased its position at the American table. The average number of Americans who consider themselves "core" wine drinkers has increased nearly 30 percent every year since 1997, and is expected to continue at that pace for at least the next several years.

Is it all those furry animals? It hasn't hurt those who have focused on the technique. Bonny Doon Vineyard is the most famous of those whose labels spark more conversation than the actual wines. That's no rap against Randall Grahm's wines. For many wine writers (this one included), Bonny Doon's wines are always interesting, and have been delivering consistently great value for two decades.

But half the fun of Bonny Doon wines is the labels. The monkey on Gary Taxali's Bouteille Call (as in bootay), Chuck House's Il Fiasco label, Grady McFerrin's Exquisite Corpse label and the Heart Has Its Riesling label by artist Bascove are beautiful works of art that deliver on three critical promises: the label is attractive and alluring, it is different from all others and it says a great deal about the wine inside the bottle, albeit metaphorically.

Illustrator and wine maniac Ralph Steadman has produced some of Bonny Doon's most identifiable labels. But to a wine nascent buyer, all of Bonny Doon's labels suggest that the winery isn't taking itself too seriously, although the craftsmanship in the bottle makes it obvious that these people know what they're doing.

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COUNTERING WINE CULTURE

The power of the label is clear to the owners of brands such as Fat Bastard and Old Fart, whose wines claim no special attributes outside of their relative value and, well, shock value.

But something else is at work; it's what some call anti-marketing. The labels play against and mock the seriousness of wine and wine culture, granting the buyer permission to be somewhat ignorant and revel in it.

Perhaps that's part of the joke in a brand like White Lies, which is marketed to women who may be lying about any number of things, including how much they drink and how much they paid for the bottle.

Beer marketers have honed this approach to an art form. Certain low-price brands are now popular with sub-cultures like skaters and ravers, and beer executives strive to avoid participating too visibly.

"We didn't put together a national TV or radio campaign," says Alan Willner, marketer at Pabst Brewing Co., San Antonio, Calif. "We didn't do what most would do." Willner and others understand that if these consumers think you're marketing a brand to them, they may stop buying your product.

It's obvious that wine has made it too hard for newcomers to participate. Survey after survey reveals that one reason some people consume beer or cocktails is that wine is too complicated.

Perhaps wine is simplified when a famous person endorses it, or when that famous person drops his or her name directly on the label. Golf legend Greg Norman's wines have had great success, though it may be as much the muscle of Foster's Wine Estates as the wine or the name on the label.

Still, brands such as Marilyn Merlot have enjoyed long careers; Marilyn Monroe graces each label. Does this simplify things? Or does it, as with Hahn Estates's Red Flyer (a sci-fi wine), find its market by pitching to a small group of potential devoted followers?

UNCORKING CONTROVERSY

Beyond labels, wine's other great vulnerability is its closure. The cork worked just fine from the 17th century onwards, but corks have three great weaknesses: they're hard to remove, aren't meant to last more than a couple of decades and are prone to problems, such as cork taint (TCA).

Here, too, Bonny Doon was one of the pioneers. Grahm was an early adopter of synthetic corks, but those seemed to share the same problems as traditional corks, even if TCA wasn't one of them. So, Grahm's choice of closure is now the screwcap. He is not alone.

In 2001, New Zealand wine producers stunned the industry when the country's wine association announced that all or at least most of their wines would be finished with screwcaps. The perception that only cheap wines are topped with screwcaps would be turned on its head because New Zealand, as a country, has the highest per bottle wine price in the world.

Plumpjack, the high-end Napa brand, then announced that it too was going to adopt screwcaps for at least part of its production, with the cork-finished wine selling for $100, the screwcap for $125.

The cork producers continue to champion their cause, pressing Britain's Prince Charles into the fray. A couple of years ago he warned that the movement away from corks could decimate the cork industry and undercut the ecological balance of southern Portugal.

Apparently, he has never visited the area. Ecological balance hardly seems the hallmark, and the cork industry will find other markets for its products. It's also likely corks will remain the closure of choice for many producers for the next decade.

But in the words of the most influential wine writer Jancis Robinson, "It's all too late." Grahm organized funerals for the cork back in 2002. A visit to a progressive retail shop reveals not only bottles with screwcaps but more variety than ever in (gasp!) bag-in-box wines.

The Australians have offered quality wines in bag-in-box packaging for years; it was only a matter of time before someone on this side of the Pacific did so. A three-liter bag-in-box wine may cost more than $25 today, reflecting that the wine is competitive with bottles costing $7 or so.

Tetra-paks--long popular in European grocery stores--now have arrived on American shores. These don't promise long aging in the cellar; what these packages do promise is convenience, which a bottle closed with cork can never deliver. A bottle is breakable and a cork requires a corkscrew, something consumers need lessons to know how to use. What does it say about an industry that it demands a training session before a consumer can access its products?

Screwcaps are convenient. They open and re-close easily. Boxes are portable. Labels now engage, not intimidate. These developments reflect a new attitude among American wine producers and marketers: that wine should easily give pleasure and comfort.

Restaurateurs, despite their proclivity to expand their wine programs with unknown and esoteric wines, need to remember that most guests are looking for a fun and perhaps even frivolous experience. While there will always be people who treat wine, or at least certain wines, as hallowed possessions, most people just want to have a drink.

RELATED ARTICLE: WINE CLOSURE

Q&A

WHAT IS A TETRA PAK?

A new breed of packaging seen in some stores looks more like juice containers than wine vessels. These are tetra-paks, containers composed of a stable plastic that does not taint or flavor the wine.

However, manufacturers are still unwilling to vouch for the containers' ability to maintain the integrity of a fine wine, at least beyond one year of use.

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ARE SCREWCAPS REALLY OKAY?

There have been some who insist that screwcaps can magnify nascent winemaking blemishes, such as reductiveness (most easily characterized as a rubbery smell). It may be true that screwcaps do this, but in effect they are actually revealing correctable mistakes in the wine itself. Perhaps it is simply that winemakers with these concerns are going to learn to make cleaner wines.

For those interested in aging their wines, screwcaps are the ideal closure and will last far longer than a traditional cork.

WILL CORKS DISAPPEAR?

It is doubtful that wine producers will dispense altogether with corks. Some great and influential winemakers, such as Beringer's Ed Sbragia, insist that corks will always be their closure material.

Many in the industry believe that the percentage of cork taint (now estimated to harm between two and five percent of all wines) will decrease as the cork industry is under less pressure to grow at the meteoric pace it saw in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Doug Frost is a Kansas City-based wine and spirits writer and educator. He is one of only three people in the world who is both a Master Sommelier and Master of Wine.