Earlier this year, Lofty launched a series of wines made from Pinot Noir grapes grown on the Sonoma Coast. The Putnam family purchased their vineyard site in 1977. After years of selling their grapes to other producers, second-generation vineyard owners, Allison Putnam Holton and her husband Matt Holton, were inspired to start their own label to express the passion they’d developed for high-quality Pinot Noir wines.

To kick off the design project, Gatto Rivera Branding visited the site on a hot August day. As we drove out to Putnam Vineyard, we were taken by how dramatic the landscape became. Located only 6 miles from the Pacific Ocean as the crow flies, the lack of cell phone service is an indicator that you’ve arrived somewhere that is, if not truly wild, certainly remote! Trudging up the hill we got a sense of how much hard work goes into to farming this property. It is clear no one would bother to grow grapes here if the wines these vineyards produced were anything less than exceptional.

When developing the package design we had to reconcile how to convey the drama of the wine’s provenance on the small canvas of a bottle. Our solution was to create a vivid, abstract metaphor to serve as hero on a 3/4 wrap label. Premium paper substrate cues consumers in to the high-quality contents inside. A blind deboss of the vineyard’s geographic coordinates at the edge of the label lends a sense of discovery to drinkers. A simple serif wordmark lets the graphic do the heavylifting for brand recognition.