Belle Vallée Cellars
Label Art from Glass Plates - Popular and Distinctive
by Alison Ruch, Avalon Staff Writer, March 2005
The Belle Vallée wine label art captures the layers of pizzazz and complexity in the wines.
Winemaker Joe Wright initially imagined more traditional labels for his wine. He thought they would be "very black-on-white, big cursive - maybe Burgundian in package." The labels ended up looking quite the opposite.
Mike Magee suggested Wright check out some of his wife Claire's glass plate art to use as backdrops for the labels. Claire has been making glass art for several years, and in the past five years has become especially interested in fusing glass.
Simply put, she said, this means "melting pieces of glass together in a kiln." Besides plates for Belle Vallée wine labels, Claire also makes gorgeous glass serving plates, lamps, and jewelry.
When Joe was planning the labels for Belle Vallée, Claire Magee met with Wright and the two discussed how the wines would be best represented.
"I made these wines and I know them," Wright said. "They have personalities, and I tried to convey to Claire the visual aspect of these wines. I know what they taste like and if they could look like something, this is what they would look like."
The Whole Cluster Pinot Noir was the first wine to use art from Claire's plates. A bright, primary colored image, Wright said of the art, "That's the wine. That's what's in the bottle. It just popped off as sort of jazzy and frazzled."
Claire describes the creative process as such: "We'll sit down and talk about the wine, and then I make several prototypes (tiles) and take them to Joe and he'll say yeah or nay... For the Cuvée - our highest end wine - I used pure gold foil. And for the Port - a rich, tasty, vibrant wine - I used really bright colors and dichroic glass."
She notes, "Dichroic glass is very expensive! You use it like jewels. Joe had told me before I made that label, 'I want something really jazzy - really dynamite,' so I showed him some jewelry I had made, and Joe said 'I want something like that!'"
Some of Claire's Glass Art
Once the appropriate plate has been chosen it is photographed, text is added to it, and it's turned into a label. Mike Magee works on the finishing touches, "using foils and embossing to create that sense of 3D depth . . . to try and replicate Claire's art on a 2-dimensional label."
Mike says, "People just love our packaging. We were going to do new labels every year, but felt we needed the consistency [at first]... We're definitely thinking this next year we'll roll in a new series - same feel. You'll still know it's a Belle Vallée Cellars label."
The Pinot noir Port label is one of Belle Vallée Cellars' most unique designs. "The risk" as Mike Magee called it, "was that I didn't put our name on the front of it."
He noticed that when Claire displays her art at shows, people are compelled to pick it up, to touch it. "I realize that's an essential part of getting that bottle off the shelf," he said. "I wanted something so distinctive, so artisticÉ As soon as [customers] pick it up and turn it over they'll see "Pinot noir Port" - something so original.
People just love it. Our distributor was doing a tasting in Nye beach and a woman walked in and said, 'I want to buy that bottle' - without even knowing what was in it! Joe calls it his "Picasso."
More recently Claire has been "making fused glass labels for Belle Vallée Cellars' magnum bottles, shaped to fit the bottle and then glued on - so we have a physical glass label."
Belle Vallée Cellars recently donated 5 magnum bottles and a large port bottle to the Classic Wine Auction held in Portland (one of the five biggest wine auctions in the U.S., for which proceeds go to several children's charities), and these beautiful bottles went for $4,500!
