Packaging is an essential marketing element for wineries of every size, but extremely small wineries face additional challenges. For this first annual Artisan Winemaking Issue, we contacted some of the smallest producers across the United States to learn what packages they chose and why.

We restricted our sources to bonded wineries producing less than 1,000 cases per year. There are currently about 2,200 of these wineries, classified as “limited” in size by WinesVinesDATA. We looked for relatively high price-points, and especially for very distinctive packages. These artisan producers had plenty to say.

Anomaly Vineyards ~ St. Helena, Calif.
Annual production: 900 cases     Price-point: $85/bottle
Labels: Embossed, two foils     Closure: Natural cork

Linda and Steve Goldfarb have been making one wine, Cabernet Sauvignon, at Anomaly Vineyards in St. Helena, Calif., since 2000. As befits a 900-case-per-year, $85 per bottle Napa Valley Cab, Anomaly’s package (above) exudes elegance.

Linda Goldfarb described its evolution. “Our packaging is very important. The label is a story in itself.” It started with naming the winery. The Goldfarbs discovered that their first few choices were already trademarked. So, on a weekend getaway, they secluded themselves in their Mendocino hotel room sans food, and started thumbing through the thesaurus. “Anomaly”—meaning unusual, unexpected, out of the ordinary—provided the “aha” moment. “That’s us doing a winery project,” they agreed. “It felt just right, it felt like us.”

The label, designed by CF Napa, Napa, Calif., has remained the same since the first release. The howling coyote is based on a bronze statue (now in the Anomaly cellar) that resembled the Goldfarbs’ deceased husky-shepherd mix, Indee. The labels are produced by Herdell Printing, St. Helena, Calif., on white linen stock overlaid with black ink. Indee’s image is embossed, using four-color process. The stars and varietal name are gold foil;  “Anomaly” is copper foil.

They chose natural cork, “because it is important to us to use all natural materials that come in contact with the wine.” Rich Xiberta USA, Cotati, Calif., supplies the Portuguese cork. Bottles are topped with tin capsules from RiverCap, Benicia, Calif., “because they hold up the best and give the best seal to the glass and cork,” Goldfarb said. “Unlike other products, tin stretches when applied by a capsule machine to fit perfectly.”

The bottles, also unchanged since 2000, are Bordeaux-style antique green Premiere sourced directly from Saverglass, Napa, or through Demptos Glass, Fairfield, Calif. “It is not a heavyweight bottle,” Goldfarb noted. Napa’s Ryan-McGee Bottling Co. comes in every year to bottle, cork, capsule and apply the pressure-sensitive labels. “We used to do all the labeling by hand—the labels were glued on at that point,” Goldfarb recalled. Anomaly switched to pressure-sensitive labels “when our production was large enough to use Ryan-McGee.” The Goldfarbs are pleased with the way the packaging elements work together and do not plan any changes.

Lakeside Vineyards & Winery ~ Felicity, Ohio
Annual production: 300-450 cases    Price-point: $10-$14/bottle
Labels: Front only; fanciful, family-designed Closure: Natural cork

While Anomaly’s could accurately be categorized a “critter” label, its image is about as high-end as it gets. Lakeside Vineyards & Winery, Felicity, Ohio, takes a more playful approach for its packaging for 300-450 cases annually. Mostly hybrid, some native American grapes and fruit are bottled as varietals and blends, available only in Ohio for $10-$14 per bottle. They are fancifully labeled with proprietary names like Chill white table wine and Therapy red table wine. “We design the labels,” said Tim Downey, who owns Lakeside with his wife, Lynn.

“We want them to be fun, easy to remember and reflect something about the wine,” Downey said. Labels are printed by M. Rosenthal, Cincinnati, Ohio. Lakeside does not use back labels. Its closures, “mostly natural cork,” come from All American Containers Inc., Tampa, Fla., as do plastic capsules. Lakeside, founded in 2007, sells 99% of its production direct-to-consumer, and it does not ship wine. The Downeys are also content with their current package: “We have fun with our wines and want people to talk about the labels. The label is very important. Our bottles stand out without being over the top,” Downey said.

Calaboose Cellars ~ Andrews, N.C.
Annual production: 400 cases    Price-point: $10-$18/bottle
Labels: Printed in-house on waterproof stock    Closure: Micro-agglomerated cork

In our May cover story “Strategic Packaging,” we spoke with designers about their recommendations for wineries in need of new or revamped packages. They urged wineries to evoke consumer emotion by depicting a strong “sense of place.”

Few have done this as effectively as Calaboose Cellars, Andrews, N.C. Owner Eric Carlson said it is the smallest freestanding complete winery in the United States in physical size: just 300 square feet including cellar space, storage, tasting area, lab, office and bathroom. It was the first town jail, as reflected by the name, which is slang for jail.

According to the Calaboose website: “In the shadows of the Great Smoky Mountains, there’s an old stone building with bars on the windows that overlooks our small vineyard. Legend has it that the local lawman locked up the hooligans here to cool down until they went before the magistrate. Now we use the calaboose to incarcerate our wine before it makes its escape to you.”

Calaboose produces about 400 cases per year from native American and hybrid grapes as well as local fruit; they retail from $10/bottle for dessert wines to $18 for Chambourcin and Seyval. The labels, designed by Web-sites.com, also in Andrews, illustrate the backwoods image of this tiny winery. “We have used these labels since we started selling our wines in 2008,” Carlson said.

“We were looking to showcase our tiny calaboose on our varietal labels and have some fun with our fanciful (proprietary) labels.” Carlson and his wife Judy print them using an HP LaserJet 1600 on waterproof polyester label stock from OnlineLabels.com, Longwood, Fla. The back labels reinforce the down-home image with homespun prose.

The Carlsons last year switched from a “much heavier, full-punt bottle to a lighter, amber Hock bottle from All American Containers.” They invite four “bottling babe” friends to bottle 50-80 cases per day on their one-position Enolmatic filler with inline Tandem filter. A Swiss floor hand corker inserts micro-agglomerated corks from CorkTec, Stafford Springs, Conn.

Capsules, from Waterloo Container, Waterloo, N.Y., are PVC. “We prefer these because of ease of use on our side. Plus, they have a pull tear for the user,” Carlson noted. “We use a standard heat gun for shrinking them.”

Aside from buying an additional filler to crank up production, “The thought has crossed our minds to have our labels printed on rolls. The beauty of getting ready for our short-run wines trumps these thoughts so far,” Carlson said.

Calaboose sells 74% of its wines at the tasting room and the remainder to wine shops within an hour’s drive of the winery. “We feel the importance of our packaging is equal for both of these channels,” Carlson said.

“The experiences you get at most tasting rooms can blur together. Our marketing plan is to leave the tasting room visitor with two simple take-home memories: We are the smallest winery in the country, and the winery is the first town jail. We feel our packaging is a perfect fit to help deliver these folksy messages.”

Leigh’s Garden Winery ~ Escanaba, Mich.
Annual production: 300 cases    Price-point: $12-$20
Labels: Family designed with sepia images    Closure: Synthetic

Owner M. Leigh Schmidt has tripled production since he opened his “garden” last year: He now produces a mighty 300 cases per year of mostly blends ($12-$20) from cool-climate hybrids including Frontenac, Marquette, Maréchal Foch, Prairie Star and Louise Swensen, as well as fruit. He and his designer daughter, Emily, conceive the line’s evocative, retro labels, using sepia images to focus on their city, often posing family members.

“The image we are projecting, I hope, is that we are a family-oriented winery with ties to the city and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in general, and that our wines have a story to tell that is encapsulated on the back label and in the wine itself,” Schmidt said. Labels are all hand applied, “but I’m projecting we will have to mechanize” as production increases.

Bottles come from Kaufman Container, Minneapolis, Minn., or L.D. Carlson Co., Kent, Ohio. “Inexpensive is the key word here,” according to Schmidt. “We try to match the bottle color to the wine type: green Bordeaux for dry reds, clear for rosé, tall hock blue for our wine that is like a Riesling, tall hock brown for our dry white. We have never used heavy bottles.”

Bottling involves a simple hand rinser to sanitize, and a two-station, timed bottler with CO2 injection from XpressFill, San Luis Obispo, Calif. Synthetic closures from G.W. Kent, Ypsilanti, Mich., or Nomacorcs sourced from L.D. Carlson are inserted with a floor corker. Schmidt prefers heat-shrink capsules, matched to label colors, because they are easy to use and open and provide “a nice finish,” he said.

Schmidt said the packaging helps customers understand the cold-climate grape wines he produces. All sales are consumer-direct at the tasting room. He mentioned the challenges of dealing with TTB label approval for a raw start-up winery.

“We did not have a point of focus prior to viewing the approval process, and we stumbled several times before we got it right,” he recalled.

“It is a process that makes me nervous every time I submit a label” because fixing a rejected label takes time. Equipment and construction issues added to the pressure, but Schmidt concluded, “We started in an economy that was struggling and have made out OK.…We anticipate breaking even in our fifth year.”

Calafia Wines ~ St. Helena, Calif.
Annual production: 500-800 cases    Price-point: $45/bottle
Labels: Embossed with three foils    Capsules: Custom tin

Established in 1979, Calafia Wines in St. Helena, Calif., is the oldest of the artisan operations in our survey. It produces 500-800 cases annually of two Bordeaux-style blends: an estate bottled proprietary red, La Reina, and a Napa Valley red that sells for $45/bottle: The 2005 Napa Valley blend is the only release currently available. About 20%-25% is sold direct-to-consumer, according to co-owner/winemaker Randle Johnson.

Johnson said Calafia’s simple, classic package has “slowly evolved over 31 years,” incorporating refinements from Kathyrn Havens Design, Napa, into the original package by Sharon Hartman. “Elegance, beauty, clean lines, style and historical tribute” are the goals. For the 2006 vintage, “We changed the script writing in a couple of letters to make it more easy to read,” Johnson said.

Napa’s Ben Franklin Press prints the labels, which include embossing and three foils. Back labels explain the name, logo and provide tasting notes. They are applied with wet glue (which Johnson called “more environmentally sensitive”) by mobile bottlers.

Calafia’s bottles are medium weight WP 1312, tall, antique green, high shoulder with full punt from Owens-Illinois, Perrysburg, Ohio. Custom capsules are 57mm tin, “excellent quality for a high-end product,” Johnson said. “They have weight and are wrinkle free.”

Calafia’s package, Johnson said, is “very important to marketing. It is the first impression for many consumers. It tells the consumer that it is a high-quality wine: elegant, classy, refined, subtle and both contemporary and traditional at the same time.”

Rock Creek Vineyard ~ Green Valley, Calif.
Annual production: 350 cases    Price-point: $22-$35/bottle
Labels: Water proof, stain-resistant, embossed    Capsule: Shrink-wrap plastic

Adjacent to Napa County, Solano is home to 19 wineries. Carolyn and Thomas West founded Rock Creek Vineyard in Green Valley in 2001. Zoning limits their production to 500 cases annually, but typical output is about 350 cases, according to Tom West: Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon at $22/bottle; Sangiovese at $24 and Dal Cuore, a super-Tuscan-style blend, $35. Almost all—80% to 90%—is sold at the winery, where buyers can choose among embellished custom wrappings and travel packages designed by Carolyn West.

“We want the consumer to view their purchase as a very special item, and to encourage the notion that this wine is a great gift idea,” Tom West explained. “Fine Handcrafted Wines” is the service mark and, West said, “Everything is done by hand: Manual bottle fillers, hand corkers, hand-operated capsule heaters and hand-operated labelers are among the tools used.”

Rock Creek uses medium-weight, classic dark green Bordeaux bottles from Demptos Glass. “I would prefer a heavier bottle for our premium wine,” West said. “We use natural cork for reasons of authenticity and perceived consumer preference.” The corks, from ACI Cork, Fairfield, Calif., are imprinted with the winery’s logo, name and website.

West uses shrink-wrap plastic capsules from Spain’s Canals, now distributed in the U.S. by Sparflex, Ukiah, Calif. “They are less expensive, provide adequate protection and are simple to apply,” he said. With his tiny production, he said, “It’s hard to justify” using more expensive tin capsules, although he’d love to put them on the Dal Cuore.

“We find the label itself is by far the most important aspect of packaging,” West stated. Rock Creek is named for an Oregon homestead established by his great-grandfather in the 1860s, and the label, he said, “honors our soils, our

family history and our commitment to the hard work of making great wines.” Designed by Emmy-winning creative director Jon Soto, Lafayette, Calif., the label features a photograph of a stone heart that Soto found, with a line drawing of a vine taken from an old manuscript of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam.

“We were seeking to tell a story of the struggle of the vines to emerge from our stony soils,” West explained. The labels are printed by Herdell on waterproof, stain-resistant, heavy, adhesive-backed paper, using full color with gradient shading, embossing and back labels unique to each variety of wine.

Endless stories
As diverse as our subjects are, unified only by their size and dedication to their handcrafted wares, one common thread shines through. Each uses packaging to tell a singular story. The stories are as different as the voices that tell them, but for tiny wineries as much as for vast ones, the right story told the right way is the key.