Early Birds is a new brand created for the mid-range wines of Stratsin Winery. It hides secret meaning closely related to people who run the winery. Here like in my SOULMATEs project I started from ground zero. Stratsin is a family winery so I decided to focus on family theme on one hand. On the other – these were their very first wines and they were really impatient to show them to the world. So this was all I was thinking of when I started brainstorming on this new brand. I wanted to create something memorable, something crazy but also something you would feel comfortable with… a symbol of family, love, tradition, generations, new beginning, etc.
This is how the idea of Early Birds came to me. It is an epitome in a custom wine label – a nest with two eggs in simple black & white illustration symbol of the family while the two eggs are for Krassy and Marina – people who own and run the Stratsin Winery. As I said before Early Birds is their first wine project born in their new winery nest. This is the short story of how this brand was created. The rest is a matter of design, paper, bottles, etc.
As in many other projects of mine, I have chosen Saverglass’ Agape bottle for its elegant well designed form. The label is in simple rectangular shape in classic proportions. The Early Birds title at the top is hand lettered and then stamped with matt copper hot-foil. Below are the grape variety and the winery name, followed by the nest with the eggs. I did several sketches for the nest on paper but at the end I took my Wacom Cintiq and drew it in Inkscape. After several minor changes it was finished and when I placed it in my design I decided to enhance it somehow and overprinted it with transparent raised varnish like I did a few years ago for my Salla White project.
The paper for this project was one of my favorite and also one those I was very familiar with – the Velmart by UPM Raflatac. It was my choice because of its nice balanced random texture and pure white color – a perfect canvas for my artwork.
The capsule is silver polylaminate with copper hot-foil stamping for the Early Birds brand.
The wine range consists of 2 whites, 2 reds and a rose wine. I am really happy with the final result and I really love the idea of using epitome in my wine labels. This is one of the ways to make them unique and memorable for the audience.
Designed by Jordan Jelev (the Labelmaker)
