Five Wines With Cool Labels

Like learning how to do your taxes or how to load properly load a dishwasher, I genuinely think that figuring out how to choose a nice bottle of wine to take to someone’s house should be something that they teach in school. It’s an integral part of being an adult yet somehow we’re just expected to know the difference between a £5 chardonnay and an £18 sauvignon blanc without having so much as a whisper of a WSET qualification.

The truth is that the best tactic I’ve found for deciding what bottle will best show your friends that you’ve got your life together is going for the wine that looks the most aesthetically pleasing. Bringing a good bottle of wine to a dinner party is very important but so is bringing a bottle of wine that looks cool. Most of us judge a wine bottle by its label anyway, so unless you’re rocking up to a knees-up with a bunch of sommeliers, you can probably get away with bringing just about any old plonk as long as it looks impressive.

I am, of course, not advocating here that you buy a crap wine just because it’s got a fun cartoon graphic on it. That’d be shallow. What I am advocating, however, is that you try to buy a good wine that’s got a funky label that you like the look of. Not only will it look slick on your IG story but it’s a nice way to give back to the producers actually making an effort with how their wine looks. Creativity should be rewarded and, more than often, the people who have made effort into making sure their bottles look good has put the same effort into their wine. The inverse is true for eyesores like Barefoot wine – if it looks like a headache, drinking it will probably give you one.

These are five wines with cool labels that you should actually think about buying.

Vinho verde (or “green wine”) is a popular style of Portuguese wine that’s often tart and super refreshing. It’s the sort of thing you should drink when the sun is shining and you’ve got your feel-good playlist blaring out loud. This particular vinho verde is produced by the London wine bar and restaurant Noble Rot. The label artwork is designed by Jose Miguel Mendez and the perfect indictment of what the wine is: fun, fresh, and not too serious.

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This organic, vegan-friendly wine is a real Spanish ripper. A mix of Syrah and Garnacha gives this a fruity flavour profile while the Tim Burton-esque wine label cements it as a bottle that you’ll definitely want to put on your Instagram story. This is a wine that’s been designed well but, more importantly, designed to be drunk.

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For a wine bottle that you’ll delay recycling for a couple of weeks just so you can keep on looking at it, you can’t get much better than this skin contact Semillon from Swartland, South Africa. Nouveau Wine is a British-South African project that specialises in low intervention wine. Each wine is hand-harvested and aimed at providing drinkers with the best expression of the grape and terroir possible. The transparency of their winemaking process is even conveyed in the transparent bottles they put their wine in. Clever, eh?

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A very drinkable number from the south of France, Château Ollieux-Romanis’s Lo Petit Fantet d’Hippolyte is a blend of different grapes (Grenache, Marsanne, and Roussanne to be exact) that delivers straightforward satisfaction. The label is super cute and features a drawing created by the Vigneron’s young son, Hippolyte. Hence the wine’s name.

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Staffelter Hof’s wines aren’t cheap but they’re wonderfully made and a brilliant example of what the natural wine scene is all about. The Little Bastard is a funky, musty German blend that tastes as good as the label looks. Speaking of labels, all of Staffelter Hof’s are designed by Aaron Scheuer – a close friend of the vineyard’s owner. They’re fun, fetching, and add a personality to each and every cuvée.

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