Taite on the Bottle

With Paddy’s day approaching Illustrators Ireland member, Fintan Taite gives us a great little project about drinking, St. Patrick and all things green. Nice one Fintan!
The Client: Niepoort Wines Portugal. As a producer, Niepoort is acknowledged as one of the leading lights of the Douro and Portugal. The range of wines produced by this company is extensive and includes a comprehensive selection of all port styles, rose, white and red table wines.

I worked with Barbara Boyle of the Wicklow Wine Company on Niepoort’s behalf.The Wicklow Wine Company is the Irish representative of a large number of wine makers from various European countries. The Job: After my initial meeting with Barbara I came up with a number of ideas which we narrowed down to 3.

I roughly sketched these out and the results were emailed to the client back in Portugal for feedback.

They chose the St Patrick and the Snakes idea (my own choice too!) and I proceeded to final linework using my trusty (or should that be crusty?) dip pen and black India ink on Arches hot pressed paper. As you can see from the rough storyboard version I made minor changes to some of the panels.

My main concerns with the final artwork were clarity and readability. Because of the relatively small size of a wine label I tried to keep the line work and action as simple as possible, drawing it just 1 up from final print size. The Client requested that I use a single colour in the design so I let the green do some work where possible. After I received sign off on the finished artwork I sent it to Niepoort for design and print.
The Irish edition of the wine is called Sásta (As béarla, the name means ‘satisfied, pleased or contented’.) It’s produced from vines in the Cima Corgo, mainly Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Touriga Nacional, Tinta Amerela, Tinta Barroca and Tinta Cao.  The 2006 is the first edition of this Douro wine for the Irish market.While the label is meant to be fun, the wine is seriously smooth and tasty..highly recommended!

The same wine is also sold in other countries under different names, each with an individual label created by a nationally known artist. Drink Me in the UK (Stephen Appleby), Twisted in the USA (Bill Plympton) etc. Some of the labels from other countries can be viewed at www.niepoort-vinhos.com if you click on the second icon from the left hand side and scroll down about half way.
It’s in the shops now and is available in half bottle, 75cl, magnum and other larger formats recommended retail price per 75cl bottle is €14.95. Stockists – Wicklow Wine Co, Wicklow; Redmonds of Ranelagh; Red Island Wine of Skerries; Gibneys of Malahide; Fallon & Byrne, Dublin 2; Probus Wines, Oughterard

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Illustration, Step-by-steps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.