Zig Zag Zin

Tom Wark's Fermentation, the daily wine blog, has a humorous little post about a new Zinfandel from the Mendocino crop—no, not that crop.

Marijuana and Mendocino County are synonymous, with an estimated $1.5 billion underground economy generated every year by illicit pot production, according to a recent article in The Press Democrat.

Now in a wink at the county's best-known crop, two vintners have launched Zig Zag Zin.

The bottle's label is virtually identical to the covers of Zig Zag packages that contain thin white papers for hand-rolled cigarettes, including the marijuana kind.

"We see it as a trip back in time," said Tim Thornhill, co-owner of Mendocino Wine Co.

Mendocino Wine still makes and markets Parducci wines, the county's oldest and most traditional wine label. But in the past year, Mendocino Wine has become a leader in an industrywide push to woo younger wine drinkers with flashy, fun and sometimes silly labels.

For Mendocino Wine, there's Tusk 'n Red, whose label evokes the grandeur of Italian architecture but with an elephant and its tusks looming in the foreground. And there's Big Yellow cabernet, with a bright label featuring the back of a 1940s-era taxicab.

The cover story of the March issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine focuses on the zany wine label craze. The Zig Zag Zin label was too late to make the magazine's list, but the story does cite the Sebastianis' Screw Kappa Napa and Smoking Loon, along with Cleavage Creek and Fat Bastard Merlot.

But Zig Zag Zin takes things a step further.

"Growing the Good Stuff" declares a tag line on Zig Zag's back label.

This story is getting passed around like a good blunt, not only between bloggers, but among serious wine connoisseurs, creative wine labels having made the March cover of Wine Enthusiast magazine. Adam Strum, in the Enthusiast's Corner, discusses the "crazy wine label phenomenon."

Read the article by Paul Franson for a thorough listing of the labels featuring critters, celebrities, puns, young women in cheesecake mode as well as images too abstract or vulgar to be easily, or politely, described. Think of the traditional style of label: the elegant, refined script typefaces; the understated color schemes; the family crests and other simple, traditional symbols not meant to catch the eye, but rather to soothe it: tradition, quality, dependability. Such labels are also, of course, associated with wine’s elitist image in the minds of the new wave of wine enthusiasts. Certain European wine labels, particularly the French and German ones, are perceived as being inscrutable, and meant to put wine on a pedestal, unreachable by the common man and woman.

If that’s so, then wine, at least New World wine, has come a long way. It’s climbed down from its pedestal and is running around the gallery like a crazy person. The epicenters of this phenomenon are Australia and California, parts of the world often associated with a profound delight in tweaking authority. The trend has rippled to reach just about every corner of the wine world, as producers strive to create a unique image in a very overcrowded market.

For a designer's perspective on wine labels, see also Vinography, a wine blog with a local flavor, which has an interesting post "Celebrating the Design of the Wine Label."

For too many winemakers, the label is just a required piece of packaging that needs to just "stand out" and have all the legal information required by the state.

In reality, that small square of paper is a beautifully constrained space for design, an opportunity to use the restrictions of a small piece of real estate (the front and back labels for a bottle) to create a real emotional impact and embody something of the personality of the wine or those who made it.

All of which is to say that creative juices are flowing, and the naming and branding of a wine is now as important as the grape.