2014 Wine Label Contest Winners

In a vineyard, each vintage year brings in a crop of the same grape varietal, but the results in the bottle are always a little different. For the annual WineMaker Label Contest, there’s a bit of the same. Each year we put out the call for your best home wine labels, and each year we get a new and different crop of designs. As always, we are suckers for a strong design with an interesting story and chose a bird hunting theme for the top prize. Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition. Also, thank you to all of our generous sponsors for providing so many great prizes for the winning designs.

GRAND

Robert Fowler & Nyla Niblo
Saint Paul, Minnesota

Robert created his award-winning design based on both his love of hunting and also for his name: A bird hunter is called a fowler. “Hunting is an activity I enjoy almost as much as winemaking,” he said. Robert created this label to show off his wines that are blends of Vitis vinifera and Minnesota-grown cold-hardy varietals like Frontenac. He worked with his wife, Nyla Niblo, a graphic designer, to bring a sketch of a hunter’s orange-blaze vest and hat with ear flaps to life. “She added a simple firearm outline in half tone to emulate gun metal” as well as the font and image placement.

GOLD

John Falduti
Nutley, New Jersey

The name of John’s wine, Sigil, was created using a mashup of his initials and those of some friends. He thought the sound of the word was similar to “symbol” so he chose a symbol of balance — the yin yang — for the label. “For me, I can be a very calm person, like the water, or very hot headed like the fire. What better way to calm the fire than with a glass of wine?”
he said.

SILVER

Sten J. Urbom
Ronkonkoma, New Yor

All of the labels for Sten’s homemade wines this vintage feature his original watercolor paintings that are influenced by modern tattoo design and the Mexican holiday Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead). “As a trained artist (Pratt Institute BFA) I just could not bring myself to just put my wine in a plain bottle,” said Sten, “so I began to design my own labels.”

BRONZE

Dave Sienknecht & Jennifer Mayer-Portillo
San Jose, California

For Dave’s first-ever homemade Pinot Noir, he enlisted the help of his artist friend Jennifer to paint something original for the label. “I like to give some of my wines German names and I named this one ‘Schmetterling,’ meaning butterfly,” he said. Jennifer painted this design to represent, “the depth and flavor fluctuations for the Pinot Noir.”