Job description...

So, up till now, you thought I was a farmer, a winemaker and a part-time tour guide? Well now we can add to the list novice graphic designer and soon we'll add accountant, salesperson and marketing director... It's amazing how much there is to learn when you start a business with no employees, only willing friends and family to help and advise you! It's even worse when you're in a foreign country and dealing with alcohol and all of the regualtions that go with it. Once again, if it weren't for our family and friends, we would never make it. Take, for example, designing our label. How do you design a label, where do you start? Well luckily for us, I had seen a design that I really liked a while back, I had some ideas of how I wanted to transform it, but had no idea how to get to where I wanted to go. The image you see above is the result of countless hours of work on the part of many people. My mom Cindy did the original drawing of the vine, my sister-in-law Elise Kling-Marty transformed that drawing into this graphic image and tweeked and re-tweeked it endlessly until we all agreed that we liked the way it looked. The eventual label and logo will be in color, but getting the colors to be exactly how we wanted them has proved to be an even greater task, one of the most frustrating parts of the process. I would try one thing on my computer which looked different on Elise's which in the end had nothing to do with the actual print colors... We finally decided to go straight to the printer and work with them on getting the colors right. We spent over 2 hours with him, and by the time we were finished we were pretty happy, but when we got home we weren't sure again. One of the browns looks too "fleshy" and we're not sure if it's the right red, and so on and so forth! Luckily Elise had an extra Pantone color book that she sent to us so now we can decide on the colors in the calm of our house, then we just have to see how they look when we put them all together! The French would call this a "casse-tête" and boy do I agree! So I decided to show it to you in grey-scale so that you can get an idea of what it's going to look like "sans couleur". Hope you like it, 'cause we're not going to change it now!!! Unless someone came up with a really great idea!!! and all of the colors were already chosen!