The amount of organic foods is increasing rapidly, so it was only a matter of time before wines started to go organic.

There are already organic wines available, however the tricky part is telling which one are actually organic.

Here's some things that you might see on the wine bottle label and what they mean. This list is from the North Shore Outlook site

"100% Organic" means that the wines are produced with grapes that are certified 100 per cent organically grown and do not have any sulfur dioxide added.

"Organic" means that the wines are produced with a minimum of 95 per cent organic ingredients. These wines may have a very low level of sulfur dioxide added to them.

"Made with Organic grapes" refers to wines that have a minimum of 70 per cent organic grapes. These wines may have sulfur dioxide added.

Biodynamic farming techniques utilize the vineyard's natural resources to cultivate the highest-quality grapes possible without the use of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or growth stimulants.

A vineyard that is certified biodynamic meets and typically exceeds the standards and regulations for organic certified farming.

I've been keeping track of unusual wine bottle labels for a while, and I've just found a blog post with pictures of wine labels with birds.

I viewed the album, and there are a variety of designs, ranging from

* Photos of birds
* Paintings
* Symmetric symbols
* Artistic interpretations of birds
* Vintage style pictures
* Traditional style
* Profile portraits of birds
* Monochromatic silhouettes of birds

The brands are all different, and it's interesting that the appearance of the labels ranges from classy and upscale to fun and easy, but all with the common theme of birds.

Here is the photo album on flickr with all the pictures of bird wine bottle labels.

Stoney Creek Wine Press is a design firm started in 1995 that creates personalized and custom wine bottle labels. Great for adding a personal touch to a wedding or birthday. Here's a wine label created for a birthday:

The Stoney Creek site has a label wizard which makes it easy to create a label. Here's some pictures of what you can make with the Label Wizard:

Sample custom label designs (you can add your own photos):


And success stories from people who created custom labels with Stoney Creek.

Here is a tip for removing wine bottle labels from Martha Stewart. Why would you want to remove a label? For your own wine, for use in a scrap book, or just to save it.

Go to the article here. Or read it here:

Fill the bottle with hot water, and then soak it in warm, soapy water. After an hour, the label should be floating off the bottle or clinging loosely. If it is still stuck, continue soaking for an hour more, even overnight if necessary. For a stubborn label, carefully use a single-edge razor to scrape the label off. Once the label has soaked off, place it on a paper towel, adhesive side up, blot, and allow to dry. Now you have a label ready to be placed in a scrapbook or journal.

There is also a video posted on the site if you prefer to watch. The clip is from the Martha Stewart TV show and it is about 8 minutes long.

You will find it here. There are some funny parts. Enjoy!

I found this useful free service on Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library TV site. It's very easy to use. Just type in the name of the wine then hit search. If you can't remember the whole name, just type in one word and click search anyway. There is a good chance you will find what you are looking for.

Here's the results of a search for "Yellow Tail": Yellow Tail search.


It's a great tool for finding the names of those wine that you can't remember. There are also comments so you can find out what other people think about the wine. Enjoy.

Here's the description they give on the Wine Labels site, which you can find here: Label finder

Wine Labels lets you find, tag, share and comment on over 10,000 different wine labels from all around the world.

You can also find pictures of labels like this one of Yellow Tail:

Your dog can have his own wine - Putting dogs on wine bottle labels

Wine bottle labels can tell a story. That's what the people at www.dogloverswineclub.com have shown.

Members submit photos of their dog and a story. Each month, they choose one dog and create a special wine and special label based on the selected dog. The result is a brand new wine paired with an interesting story to talk about while you are enjoying the bottle of wine.

Read the full story here: OC Register

"We wanted to create a personal wine experience," says Matt Hahn, 47, co-founder of the Buellton-based Dog Lovers Wine Club, which features a different member's dog on the label each month. "It's not just about the wine - it's about the labels and the stories."

One month, it's Petunia, the 65-pound German shepherd who had shriveled to just 33 pounds on the street before Hueg rescued her. Another month, it's Ripley, a golden retriever who had to be wheeled around by her owners when she got old. Then it's Brooklyn, a rescued papillon mutt with a marble in place of one eye.

Members submit photos and stories of their dogs at www.dogloverswineclub.com. Each month, Hahn creates a new label while co-founder Fleet Hamilton creates a premium wine from guest winemakers, like Santa Rosa's Deloach Vineyards (named "Winery of the Year" nine times by Wine & Spirits Magazine).

Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Humane Society or nonprofit dog rescue group of your choice, provided it's registered with the club.

The "everydog" concept escalates a recent trend in the $9 billion-a-year U.S. wine industry toward folksier labels for those who don't take their wine too seriously.

This story is just one example of the increasing amount of interesting and sometimes quirky wine bottle labels.

"Wine bottle labels are the quintessential example of packaging and graphic design, meaning to represent the promise of a product" -Michael Beirut

I just finished listening to a podcast with graphic designer Michael Beirut about package design. At one point in the interview (22:18), the interviewer asks: "What is it about wine labels?!" , since wine labels in the past were much simpler and have now evolved to include elaborate designs, paintings, etc.

Beirut describes the process of buying wine for the average person (someone who does not read wine magazines or reviews) as: "You're standing in the wine store, you scan the shelves...If you are like most people, you have an idea of how much you want to spend, and you are gaping at these labels, and they just kind of well, work their magic on you."

And then the person buying the wine usually categorizes the wine in their head as:
"The one that looks expensive, the one that looks kind of saucy, fun for a picnic, romantic..."

He concludes with: "A lot of what you are drinking is the picture on the label, as opposed to the thing in the glass"

The full episode can be found in a podcast cast episode of "The Leonard Lopate Show" located here. Michael Beirut's website is: http://www.designobserver.com. His new book is called Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design

An RFID tag is a small chip that can be embedded into a wine label and used to store information about the wine, like what winery it came from, the region, a description, the price, shipment information, etc.

The tag would serve the same same purpose that a bar code now usually serves (information, inventory) . The advantage that an RFID has over a bar code is that it can be scanned through an item. Since it works with radio waves, it doesn't need to be aimed at with a scanner. It just needs to be within a certain radius to be read through the air. That distance can vary between 10 and 350 feet, depending on the frequency used in the RFID.

There are people already working on an RFID wine rack, like Mike Kuniavsky, who mentioned the following on his blog:

The problem is that wine bottles are terribly difficult to track. As collectibles, there are market pressures to create scarcity, which leads many producers (especially of high-end wines) to avoid using the most common object tracking mechanism, the UPC barcode. Barcodes symbolize mass production to wine producers struggling to create scarcity, so they don't use them, or use them haphazardly. We feel this ends up backfiring on wine producers, creating obscurity instead. Wine is a classic Long Tail product: in other words, there's a huge volume of potential in the obscure end of the market, but despite wine's early entry as objects of cutting-edge technological consideration, it hasn't achieved nearly its potential.
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Since we're currently working on an RFID wine rack, we're thinking a lot about these issues. We would like the answer to be RFIDs embedded in wine labels (invisibly) coupled with open, shared communication standards for exchanging wine information. These should look forward toward the capabilities of the technology and the "social life" of objects that bridge the information and physical worlds, rather than trying to copy UPCs or ISBNs, as valuable as those have been.


Mike's book is called: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research