Fun stuff Friday: wine, dancing, eye-catching labels, and the humorous side of racial profiling

September 5, 7:01 PMWine ExaminerLeslie Cramer

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Dancing' the night away

You're at the front door to the weekend.  With luck, at least some part of it will involve wine and dancing (as will mine).  Live it up, kick up your heels, and make it a good one.  And beware the eye-catching label... 

BE SURE TO WATCH THE ATTACHED VIDEO, ONE FUNNY MAN'S TAKE ON RACIAL PROFILING.   Come on, yuk it up, it's really funny!
 

Dancing label

I was surfing the wine shops the other day, looking for a good, affordable Malbec for this month's online Wine Focus feature, when suddenly a label jumped out at me.

I mean "jumped" literally here: This label was moving! A pair of legs - male in slacks, female in stockings and heels - were sliding around a dance floor in an Argentine tango, right there on the wine-shop shelf.

Closer examination revealed that the label on Lo Tengo Mendoza Malbec contains a holographic image, one of those special photos that break up an image into tiny dots in many layers, built in such a way that the picture looks vaguely three-dimensional and seems to go into action when you move your eyes across it.

Let's pause at this point for a basic reality check: Wild, wacky and creative labels don't tell us a thing about the quality of the wine in the bottle, and it's senseless to make a wine-buying choice just because of an unusually eye-catching label.

But for those of us who enjoy watching trends and developments in the wine business, new ideas in wine labeling are worth following. In the highly competitive international market for wine, with tens of thousands of labels fighting for the consumer's attention, just about anything that makes a wine stand out among its neighbors on the shelf.

A dancing hologram grabs your attention if only because it's innovative and eye-catching. It's the first I've seen, but will it be the last? I doubt that.