Here’s our take on a stage of the label design process — selecting the designer or design company.
“Most wineries choose a label designer the wrong way.” — Barry Imber
Winery decision makers tend to wade through online portfolios, instagram accounts and online exposé accounts to compare a handful of designers, ask for a price, look for something “cool” that stands out on shelf, and hope that a pretty label will fix deeper problems.
It rarely works well that way.
If you’re a serious, craft‑oriented winery, your labels are not decoration. They are capital investments that can raise the ceiling on what’s possible for your business. Choosing the right label designer is, in many ways, choosing a strategic partner to assist in defining how your winery shows up in the world over the next decade.
This article is about how to make the right choice.
First, be honest: do you want a label… or do you want success?
When approached for label specific projects, there are two kinds of winery clients we tend to meet.
The first is a startup winery, pre‑first harvest, with a clear point of view on varietals and style. They may not have a defined brand strategy, but they know who they’d like to matter to, and they understand that this is a long game. They’re looking for someone to help them think from the ground up: brand, identity, labels, experiences, environments, the whole thing.
The second is a mid‑stage winery, often around the ten‑year mark. They’ve had some success, but sales are plateauing. New competitors feel sharper, less DIY. The portfolio grew by opportunity without strategy so it doesn’t quite make sense anymore. There’s a nagging feeling that the brand has never really been defined, and the labels, tasting room, website and story are all pulling in slightly different directions.
Both of these wineries usually arrive saying the same thing: “We need a new label.”
Sometimes they’re right, a new label is the solution for the moment. More often, what they really need is a new way of thinking about how their brand is built, communicated and experienced. A label is simply the sharpest tip of that spear. However, a label is what they’ve asked for so this article focuses on label design and how to discern the best and right label designer for your project and winery.
“A decent label designer will give you exactly what you ask for.
A great label designer will give you the success you didn’t know to ask for.” — Barry Imber
The first step in choosing the right partner is deciding which of those you actually want.
What a serious wine label process really looks like
If you’ve only seen labels as an aesthetic exercise, it can be surprising how much thinking happens before anyone starts a design file. At Insite, our process has been shaped by more than thirty years of work with wineries and other alcohol brands, so we’ve learned a few things about the design process.
Here’s what you should expect from a top‑tier design partner.
1. Discovery: asking better questions than “What do you like?”
Discovery is where you’ll know if you’re dealing with a true partner.
The right designer won’t start by asking, “Show us labels you like.” They’ll ask questions like:
Where do you want this wine to sit in the market, relative to others in your region and style?
What is genuinely different or special about how it’s made, who makes it, and where it’s made?
What does this product need to do for the business? Open a new channel? Shift your price ladder? Attract a new audience?
What do your current labels say about your winery or wine that you never intended?
Just as importantly, they’ll look outside the winery. They’ll map the category you’re operating in, look for gaps and opportunities, and identify stories that are missing in your region or tier that you might credibly tell.
If a designer’s discovery phase feels like “collecting preferences,” you’re not talking to the right person.
2. Strategy: building the whole story, not one label
The next phase is where most “label design” processes stop and where strategic designers go deeper.
Here, the conversation shifts from “What should this label look like?” to questions like:
How should your entire portfolio be structured?
Which tiers do you need, at which price points, for which channels?
How can each product play a role in telling your broader brand story?
For us, a label is never an isolated event. Each one is a deliberate building block in an ongoing narrative that unfolds over multiple products and touch-points. With every bottle a customer encounters, they should assemble a richer, more authentic understanding of who you are.
We also think about the following or culture you want to cultivate around the winery. What kind of people do you want to attract? What world are you inviting them into? The label is often the first invitation, not the entire experience.
If a designer talks about strategy purely in terms of “positioning words” and doesn’t link that directly to portfolio, tiers, channels and culture, keep looking.
3. Mood boards and brand worlds: understanding where you belong
Mood boards are not simply visual ways to convey the target style. Done properly, they’re a diagnostic tool too.
Good designers create visual “world boards” for the category: clusters of labels, brands and experiences that are working well at your price tier and in your style category, grouped by lifestyle and personality.
This lets us see:
How do successful brands at your tier signal their price and promise visually?
What can we learn from these successes while also avoiding overlap or similarity?
Where are the clichés and over‑used tropes?
Where is there room for a new story that still feels credible and desirable?
The point isn’t to copy. It’s to understand the codes of your world so we can intentionally decide where your winery should sit and how it should stretch those codes without breaking them.
If a designer’s mood boards could belong to any category, at any price point, that’s a warning sign and at it’s core, the reason why trendy design direction are often meaningless for the business because they miss the actual target consumer.
4. Design, compliance and production: where thinking meets the real world
Only after all of this do the right designers move into identity and label design.
Here, senior experience in alcohol really matters. A strong partner will:
Design with regulators and liquor control boards in mind from the start, so your label doesn’t bounce in approval of course, but almost more importantly, designing with regulatory knowledge and inclusion means the design doesn’t fall apart with regulatory changes and corrections in the 11th hour.
Choose materials that perform for the intended embellishments like papers that can properly emboss as well as in the environments where your wine lives: cold, wet, handled in retail, poured in restaurants.
Respect bottling‑line realities: label construction, emboss and deboss limits, foil, die lines, and application tolerances.
Think about how labels will read in retail, on shelf, in images, on a phone screen, and in the hand.
Most mistakes are eventually caught and corrected by printers, regulators or bottling facilities. The question is: who pays for those mistakes in time wasted, missed opportunities and lost momentum? Almost always, it’s the winery.
The best designers anticipate these constraints and use them as creative parameters, not after‑the‑fact corrections.
Case study: how one sparkling label raised the ceiling for an entire winery
Solid design partners don’t just design good labels that sell, they help in paving the way for business opportunities and expansion. For example, a number of years ago, we were asked to design a new sparkling wine label for The Grange of Prince Edward County. We had previously completed a broader brand strategy, portfolio strategy and complete wine label program redesign, but this ask was strictly for a wine label tier extension. Being that it was a new tier, the situation demanded deeper thinking.
The winery faced several challenges:
It was well established, but lacked a reputation for producing ultra‑premium wines.
Frost and neglect had reduced estate vineyards, limiting what could be grown and made on site.
The new sparkling wine would be produced in partnership with a neighbouring winery, from non‑estate grapes, by a winemaker not yet widely known as being associated with The Grange.
The release would come late in the year, with a small initial volume and a follow‑up vintage already close behind. Budgets were lean.
On the surface, it was a single premium sparkling release. In reality, it was a chance to reset what this winery could be in the minds of consumers, media and the trade.
Instead of creating a standalone “special bottle,” we:
Developed a top‑tier sub‑brand that could credibly sit above the existing range.
Rooted it in the principal owner’s family heritage and local folklore, creating a story that felt like it could have been the founding myth of the winery itself.
Designed a visual identity that could become a symbol of quality for the entire operation, not just one label.
Used classic, restrained cues and illustration to achieve an ultra‑premium feel without expensive production tricks.
The result? The wine sold through quickly, created a sense of scarcity, and generated strong media and trade attention. That demand allowed The Grange to release additional SKUs under the same sub‑brand while interest was high. It also opened the door for a new tier of ultra-premium still wines that could follow similar winemaking philosophies, even with off‑estate fruit.
In other words, a single label shifted perceptions of the winery, expanded its audience, and raised the market’s expectations of what the Grange of PEC could produce.
A modest label designer would have delivered a “nice sparkling label.”
A strategic partner delivers a change in trajectory.
When you’re choosing a designer, ask whether they have these kinds of stories—or just nice artwork.
Case study: how small, sentimental tweaks quietly hold you back
The right design partner will tell you, make you, change when it makes sense. For example, another winery, long established and family‑run, came to us struggling with labels that felt tired and sales that were losing momentum.
Over time, the core labels had been lightly updated—small refreshes here and there. Somewhere along the line, a family member had added a hand‑drawn illustration that was personally meaningful but visually dated and completely at odds with the rest of the identity. Each label was, in effect, a scrapbook of decisions made at different points in time. The label program came with sentimental landmines and sacred cows that we were asked to maintain.
Nothing told a coherent story:
There was no clear family of wines, just a collection.
Price points weren’t visibly justified—nothing signalled why one tier cost more than another.
The labels didn’t match the architecture or experience of the physical winery, which had evolved significantly.
We recognized that our work was less about “redesigning the labels” and more about reframing the brand while convincing the stakeholders to move on from the visual burden of past while still celebrating the important elements of their history:
We distilled the story down to a handful of key values and a clear purpose.
We created an identity system that felt confident, contemporary and aligned with the actual experience of visiting the property.
We re-organized the portfolio to make sense to audiences; with understandable price points within each tier, and associated story assets assigned to each tier and wine that helped the audience to better understand the purpose of the wines and the soul of the winery
We rebuilt the labels to clearly visually communicate tiers, differences and reasons to trade up.
The change in the market was immediate: increased sales, more visits, greater media interest, and a renewed sense of energy within the team. Important investments in the facility and hospitality followed, supported by the confidence that the external expression finally matched the internal ambition.
The lesson for choosing a label designer or design company:
If their first instinct is to “fix” your existing label by tweaking what’s already there and stay within the legacy guardrails even if that doesn’t make sense to the audience, then they may not be the right partner. The right designer will be willing to question the whole system if that’s what your business truly needs.
Technical and regulatory expertise: why experience matters more than you think
In wine and alcohol, almost every region has its gate keepers that define the rules and guardrails such as the VQA in Ontario, liquor control boards, distributors, wholesalers and consumer‑packaging regulators. In navigating this ecosystem, you don’t need to understand every rule and nuance. But your designer does.
Not understanding and getting it wrong always costs you. Here’s what most wineries underestimate:
The cost of being late. A regulatory misstep or label change can mean missing a print or bottling date which can cause a chain reaction that easily leads to missing a launch window or key selling season.
The cost of poor performance. Labels that don’t behave on the bottling line, wrinkle in ice buckets, or deteriorate in shipping and handling can lead to rejection at the retailer or quietly harm perception and sales.
The cost of confusing the trade. Retailers and distributors are busy. If your labels don’t clearly signal tier, style and value, the product is harder to list, harder to hand‑sell, and easier to replace. Nothing frustrates a retailer more than a poorly positioned line extension that encourages consumers to trade down to a cheaper less margin wine in the same family.
A good label will eventually be corrected. The only question is: how many cycles will it take, and what will it cost you in time, relationships and momentum?
When you’re evaluating a designer, ask:
How many years have you been working specifically with wine or alcohol?
Can you show a project where regulatory or bottling constraints significantly influenced your solution?
How long do your winery clients tend to work with you—one project, or many years?
In this niche, time plus success is not an accident. Winners tend to partner with winners for long periods of time.
Red flags: how not to choose a wine label designer
At the level where label decisions can make or lose millions over time, some selection habits are especially risky.
Here are a few red flags to watch for—in yourself and in the people you’re interviewing.
1. Treating designers as interchangeable vendors
If your process is “talk to a handful of firms and see who says the right things” without clarity about what kind of relationship you need, you’re already on the back foot.
By the time you reach out, you should have done enough homework to narrow the field to one or two partners who clearly understand your category, portfolio and ambitions. Conversations should be about fit, approach and chemistry—not about using interviews to discover your own needs as you go.
2. Comparing line‑items instead of outcomes
If you’re laying proposals side by side and comparing quantitative differences such as how many “concepts” each offers or how many rounds of revisions are included, you’re reducing a strategic partner to a commodity.
Instead, look for qualitative merit:
Depth and clarity of thinking demonstrated in previous successes.
Evidence of long‑term relationships in your category.
Ability to talk about past work in terms of business outcomes, not just aesthetics.
3. Wanting someone who won’t challenge you
It’s tempting to look for a designer who will execute your preferences and validate your ideas. It feels faster and more comfortable.
The problem is that you should be hiring them precisely because they have view points and learnings you can’t see yourself from inside your business. The right designer has created dozens of winery brands and wine labels while this may be your first, or at most you’ve been through the process a few times but for one brand. So hire and trust their experience.
A strong partner will:
Ask uncomfortable questions.
Tell you when your ideas or requests are working against your stated goals.
Push for decisions that align with your audience and brand, not just your personal taste.
If you want a label that simply matches your own preferences, you don’t need a senior designer. If you want a label that will move the market, you do.
4. Caring more about short‑term aesthetics than long‑term fit
It’s easy to fall in love with labels that look “fresh” or “different” in the moment. Or feel the burn to participate in social trends. The real question is whether they will feel right for your brand image and perform well three, five or ten years from now—and whether they genuinely belong to your winery.
When you assess designers’ experience and portfolios, ask yourself:
Does this work feel like it flows from a deep understanding of each winery’s world?
Or does it feel like a series of on‑trend solutions that could belong to anyone?
Have the designer’s solutions endured and continued to sell well — beyond just out of the gate but through the longer term?
Budget, scope and value: why you won’t find a menu price
One of the hardest truths in this space is that there’s no honest way to publish a neat price list for serious label work without either oversimplifying or being misleading.
Instead of a predetermined price menu, a good design partner’s approach is often simple:
They might have well‑defined component process phases with associated budget ranges—brand strategy, identity, label systems, environments, content, etc.
Because every client’s situation is unique, to budget their effort, they should start by understanding your goals, challenges and ambitions, then assemble the right configuration of components for you.
After understanding your needs, they can assemble the appropriate pathway of components and add up the investment to review with you. Then you can decide what components to include or leave out in order to customize the solution to your budget.
As an experienced design team ourselves, could we publish ranges? Yes. But doing so would:
Lead some potential clients to disqualify themselves before understanding the value of the partnership and what we can achieve together.
Invite less experienced designers to undercut the numbers without matching the depth of thinking or experience behind them, thereby misleading the client in thinking about budget before outcomes.
More importantly, it would reduce the conversation to “how much does a label cost?” instead of “what are you trying to achieve, and what will it take to get there?”
A few principles are worth keeping in mind:
Thinking first. The most common overspend is on research theatre and focus‑group rituals that create a false sense of security. The most common under‑spend is on actual thinking before design.
Capital, not cost. Don’t think about or calculate design as a per‑bottle expense of production. Treat it as capital expenditure to move your winery into a different space in the market. A good design solution is like buying equipment for a wine release — yes, it was a cost to get that wine out but the reality is it’ll be used for years to come, across many different wines, moving the needle forward.
Ambition matters. If your ambition is modest—“keep up,” “tidy up,” “look a bit better”—you won’t need as much. If your ambition is to step into a new tier of respect, sales and audience, the investment needs to adjust accordingly. Therefore, preparing by understanding your ambition in advance of your search so that you can communicate your intentions clearly, and then matching your designer to this need accordingly, is a key part of the designer search process.
What a 3–5 year relationship with the right designer feels like
The most valuable designer relationships don’t end when the first label goes to print. They deepen.
In a strong partnership:
The designer becomes part of your inner circle, upstream along side major decisions about products, tiers, spaces and experiences.
Projects become less about “briefing in” and more about ongoing dialogue; you’re thinking together about the future, not just the next release.
Fear and conservatism recede. When mutual trust is high, you can pursue bolder, clearer ideas that better match your ambitions and audience.
A telling question to ask a prospective design partner is: “How many of your clients have stayed with you for five years or more?” Longevity speaks volumes about whether they’re simply producing isolated pieces, or helping build something enduring.
“As with most relationships, the beginning often defines the end.”
Choose someone you can imagine having in your corner for years, not a vendor you intend to use once and replace.
What most people don’t talk about: a brief manifesto
Here’s the opinion piece in this article.
There is a persistent illusion in our industry: that if a label is trendy, clever, awarded and applauded by designers, it’s therefore successful and justified.
Awards and admiration have their place. But they do not pay the bills.
The labels that truly matter for your winery tend to share a few quieter characteristics:
They are rooted in a strategic understanding of who you are, who you serve and where you want to go.
They tell an authentic story with enough depth to attract, build loyalty and sustain interest over time, not just assert a visual gimmick for social media likes.
They are tuned to a specific audience and lifestyle, not designed to impress your peers.
They endure, creating stability within your growing portfolio and staying meaningful and relevant outside of the trends without needing to be reinvented every few years.
“The best labels act as invitations to a richer world. They promise that if someone picks up the bottle, tries it, learns more, visits, engages with the people and participates in the brand’s world, their life will be richer for it. Each subsequent label extends that invitation a little further.”
Choosing a wine label designer is, at its core, choosing who you trust to design that invitation.
If you’re a craft‑oriented, ambitious winery in Canada or the United States, and you’re ready to treat label design as capital investment rather than artwork on a vessel, the next step isn’t to collect more quotes. It’s to start a serious conversation with someone who has walked this path many times before.
If this sounds like the kind of partnership you’re looking for, I’d encourage you to reach out directly, share where you are in your journey and with your goals, and see whether the chemistry and thinking feel right. The label will follow.