the Labelmaker – Orbelia Melnik 55 Estate Reserve

“ Orbelia is a small family-run winery located in one of the most interesting wine regions of Bulgaria – Struma Valley. This is also the home of famous Melnik 55 – one of the most interesting indigenous grape varieties that is one of the foundations of modern Bulgarian wine industry.
Orbelia has great affiliation for local varieties and Melnik 55 is no exception. Furthermore – this particular wine is probably the latest gem in their diverse portfolio. They did only 897 bottles and sent me three of them, so I am having right now a rare treasure in my hands.
I knew this from our first talk and I was really convinced we should stick to classic label design but use different attractive bottle. This is how I spotted the Bourgogne Antik by Saverglass.
Very solid, yet looking elegant, this bottle could not be missed on the shelf. It also has very well designed conical part that was perfect place for my new label design.
The Project

I used very elegant serif typeface for the Orbelia brand and overprinted it with transparent varnish. The logo above is done with two layers – bottom one is for the logo solid silhouette stamped with copper hot foil and the top one is for the logo artwork printed with silk-foil with good level of embossing. Playing with matt and glossy materials from same color is something that I do very often, and I really love the result.
The label has classic shape with rounded corners. I decided to use matrix typeface with dots to print the vintage year in the background behind the variety and thus make the design more interesting with a touch of modernity.
The Estate Reserve text is stamped with copper hot foil and is hand-lettered by me on IPad Pro.
Our classic approach in this wine bottle design ended with red wax to seal the top of the bottle. The wax is a bit transparent which makes the whole packaging more natural and intriguing. The wine is distributed in custom carton box for 3 bottles.”