Ed Feuchuk | General Manager, Tank Garage Winery-Farm Collective Napa Valley
Virgil Abloh once said, “Design is about whatever I find worthy to tell a story about.”
It’s a quote I think about often when working on a brand like Tank Garage Winery. Design isn’t merely about aesthetic decoration; it’s about having a narrative. And not just any narrative, a worthy one.
In the wine world, we love to talk about “story” in the sense of heritage, terroir, and family. But the truth is, people rarely read that story first. Instead, they see it. They feel it. Long before they even taste the wine, they’ve already built a story in their mind—from the tone of our websites’ photography to the typography (or profanity, in our case) on our labels. That’s the power of visual design. It doesn’t just support storytelling, it is storytelling.
Many wineries do this well. So well, in fact, that I probably don’t even need to name them because you are already thinking about them. There is a cohesion to their visual language born from a place of purpose and conviction.
Like Scribe. Yeah, I know you were thinking about Scribe.
Let’s start with their iconic letterpress logo. It’s imperfect, with ink bleed and registration errors. This isn’t because our friends in Sonoma don’t understand kerning, it’s because they are embracing the natural imperfections inherent in analog processes. It’s what the Japanese call “wabi-sabi.” And it says a lot about Scribe’s approach to winemaking.
They believe in non-interventionist methods, where their wines faithfully reflect what their vineyard naturally expresses. That’s their narrative and their purpose. It permeates every milliliter of their visual strategy.
When users load ScribeWinery.com, they aren’t assaulted with a pop-up demanding an email address in exchange for a WELCOME10 code. No, Scribe’s website is humble, peaceful…non-interventionist. Users are greeted with a simple homepage featuring a rustic watercolor painting of their iconic hacienda. Scribe’s website is speckled with photo and video moments captured with real sunlight and naturalistic color grading. This isn’t a site optimized to create “conversions” in the growth marketing sense; it’s a site optimized to create feelings.
Then once you arrive to Scribe’s property, it will feel familiar because of it. That rustic elegance is captured in the experience. The wine tastes like it belongs in those bottles. Those bottles look like they belong on those tables. The tables look like they belong in the hacienda. Because we know Scribe’s intensions through their design choices, we know Scribe’s story. And it’s a unique one.
A lot of us in the wine world struggle to fold story into our aesthetic choices this deftly. Sometimes we make design decisions because they look cool, or because they are trendy, or because some focus group told us to. I’ve walked through a graveyard of contrived wine brands that failed to infuse substantive story into their design...and they paid the price for it.
Hell, I’ve experienced it first-hand. We have made over 250 wines at Tank Garage Winery. When we chase trends, the wines fizzle. When we approach wines with a purpose, and that story informs the design decisions, we create magic.
That’s because Virgil was right. Consumers are desperately seeking wines with worthy stories to tell. And visual storytelling starts with design. Our logos, our furniture, the artwork we have in our wineries. Each design component helps build a story and each story helps build a relationship with a consumer.
In the coming years, we will all have an opportunity to refresh our labels and update our websites. These design choices are important. Instead of thinking about what might look cool or modern, think about how to best tell consumers a worthy story.
If you’re as captivated by design theory as I am, make sure to attend the Direct-to-Consumer Wine Symposium this upcoming January. The largest conference of its kind in North America, this year’s show will feature a panel about this exact topic titled “The Art of Visual Storytelling: Elevating Your DTC Wine Brand.” Panelists include Byron Hoffman from Offset Partners, Jordan Fiorentini from Epoch Estate Wines and, of course, Nora Sibley Sanders of Scribe Winery.