The Owl & The Dust Devil: The Look of the Label

For the uninitiated wine drinker, the label can be more of a driving force than it ever should be. This is human nature. There are a myriad of studies that cite the role that attraction plays in making decisions, particularly those where we have limited information. 

There's an old saying we've all heard: "You can't judge a book by it's cover." The sentiment is great, but we all do it; whether it be books, people, or bottles of wine, they are picked or passed on based on how they look. 

Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas at Austin professor, conducted a twenty-year study looking at the correlation between physical beauty and success. More attractive people were hired and often given promotions, raises and better job packages with greater frequency than their average or unattractive peers. Hamermesh's study indicated that people assumed that the physically attractive candidates and workers had more positive traits, and were therefore given more responsibility and rated higher on performance. The conclusion: appearances matter.

Luckily we are an attractive bunch here at Fun With Booze and so none of us is worried, particularly since none of us is getting paid for this. However, I would say there are sharp correlations between how society treats attractive people and how most of us treat other products, for instance: bottles of wine. The most salient piece of Hamermesh's research for these purposes is that when a candidate or employee was found attractive, it was assumed that they had other positive characteristics; they were thought to be more intelligent, harder working and just simply more interesting. All of this is based on just looks.

So for the consumer who is buying wine based on a label it's easy, you pick out what appeals to you. For the winery it's a little trickier, figuring not only where that appeal lies, but also figuring out a way to communicate your identity on a small paper square in a matter of a few seconds. For wineries who have garnered a larger reputation perhaps the label is less important, but for those that consumers have never heard of, it's all they have to go on.

Wineries that don't take their label seriously do so at their own peril. This article pegs the number of people who buy wine based just on the label at 40%, conservatively. That's a huge consumer base that is largely uninformed about what's inside the bottle. Ultimately if you're in a grocery or busy wine shop where the staff may be busy or lack any sort of personal touch, the label has to do the heavy lifting and ultimately it may have to sell your wine. Sentimentality, watercolors and dogs will not.

The old adage "beauty is only skin deep" certainly applies in these circumstances.  A glossy label on a bottle of terrible wine will not fool the consumer more than once. Wineries should not shift their focus from creating quality a high quality wine to marketing something that is not up to their standards.  The point is however that most people will not have tried a wine, skin deep is as far as they'll get.  Not concerning themselves with what might appeal to the uninitiated customer is a terrible mistake. 

Aside from the spectacular label, the story behind the Argentinian red blend The Owl & The Dust Devil, made by Finca Decero is a captivating one that connotes a sense of place, and it's an amusing tale. The owls at the Remolinos Vineyard in the foothills of the Andes, in Mendoza, Argentina chase their imaginary adversaries, the dust devils both of them unknowingly contributing to the wine itself. The vineyard is named for the whirlwinds that make those cool dust devils, but also play a role in the production of quality fruit that goes into this wine, keeping pests at bay, and cooling down the vines in the hot Argentinian summer.

The blend is a bit of a wildcard coming from, malbec, cabernet sauvignon, petit verdot and tannat. While that last grape may be new to developing wine drinkers, it's an important one for South American wines, but that's another story, for another time. The blend itself creates a wine that will be popular and appealing, and at the same time, technically dialed in. Lots of new world fruit, and ample new French oak, so it's got rich dark fruit character, fantastic structure and a wonderful finish. Like many of the wines coming from South America, they offer refined quality at a price-point (around $25) you don't often find here in the States, at least in a larger commercial production. The use of French oak, instead of American, means that the vanilla and coffee notes accentuate the fruit as opposed to dominating it. This wine is a perfect host or hostess gift, and will appeal to a broad set of wine drinkers. And it looks good too, and, well, that matters.