Marilyn Sauvignon Blonde
Is it smart to serve Fiasco wine to toast a business merger? Should Bitch and Fat Bastard be poured at a second marriage celebration? Can Cats Pee on a Gooseberry Bush Sauvignon Blanc muck up the mood after a baptism?
What’s in a wine label, after all?
The power to influence us.
A Cornell University study showed that diners at a restaurant who drank wine with a California label liked the wine, their entire meal and even the restaurant better than the diners who were given the same wine – Two Buck Chuck Cabernet Sauvignon – that they thought, because of the label, came from that less wine desirable state, North Dakota.
“Wine labels can throw both a halo or a shadow over the entire dining experience,” Cornell Professor Brian Wansink, author of the book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, told Psyorg.com.
Linda Donovan runs Pallet Wine Co., a custom crush facility in Medford. Anyone in her business will tell you that often a client wanting to make wine comes in with one thing: the idea for the label. Everything else – from sourcing the grapes to making the vintner’s calls of when to pick, what to oak and if to blend – is left up to pros like Donovan. But labels, it seems by the hundreds of printing companies that specialize in reproducing them, are easy for amateurs. Or are they?
While prototyping a wine label, graphic design experts study typefaces, colors and overall visual content as if examining microbes in a lab. They can intellectually explain every design decision. Then emotions kick in. The label undergoes scrutiny by a focus group of wine-buying consumers and it’s either good to go or back to the drawing board.
Marketing gurus say the label offers the first impression of a wine. Is the name clever? Are the graphics smart and reflect a certain appealing aesthetic? Do the colors evoke a positive response?
Sometimes the labels themselves become collectables. Picasso, Chagall and other artists have created original art for wine labels.
The recently released book "Living With Wine: Passionate Collectors, Sophisticated Cellars and Other Rooms for Entertaining, Enjoying and Imbibing" by Samantha Nestor with Alice Feiring (Clarkson Potter, $75) has a color photograph in which a window sill in a Bel Air, California home is bedecked with empty bottles of 1982 Mouton Rothschild.
As I wrote in the Oregon Wine Press, “The contents are now just a memory, but the bottles' brag-worthiness continues. Not only are the Imperial and Balthazar sizes of this Robert Parker 100-point wine impressive, but the label reproduces the final watercolor painted by John Huston. It gaily depicts Ram leaping in joy with the sun and the vine. In effect, the spent bottles now serve as upright art easels or curved glass frames.”
The Marilyn Effect
How many of us didn’t take a second look the first time we saw the Marilyn Merlot label? It’s a bad, bad pun, and yet, Marilyn continues to be a winner for Marilyn Wines. The company released its trademarked 2009 Marilyn Sauvignon Blonde to great success.
Marilyn Wines, the story goes, began in 1981 with home winemakers in Napa Valley's St. Helena. Toasting with perhaps a little much of their newly bottled Merlot in 1983, they decided to call their creation Marilyn Merlot. Fast-forward and 18 vintages after the first public offering, Ms. Monroe’s estate beneficiaries – Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute and the Monroe Young Family Center – continue to reap in royalties.
So we can all feel good about falling for that enticing label. But the other printed gimmicks that have lured us to buy? Should we feel good about those?
Read Part Two of the Power of the Label argument, posted at http://www.examiner.com/x-20743-Medford-Wine-Examiner~y2010m6d21-The-power-of-wine-labels-second-in-a-twopart-exploration-of-a-wine-controversy.
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