Creating a champagne label that sells – ‘Tableau Vivant’

Located at the northern edges of France, the history of the?Champagne?wine region has had a significant role in the development of this unique?#terroir.?Accordingly, to legend, it was monks who bought the?method for making sparkling wine up from the?Languedoc, in the south of France; but they soon discovered that the chalky soil and climatic conditions in the Champagne region produced a bright bubbly?wine that?was in many people's opinion better than the sparkling wines produced further south.?

We were inspired by the heritage of this product and wanted to add a touch of design while representing the specific #terroir.

If you’re anything like me, you have many fond memories from both large and small celebrations of a bottle of champagne sitting in an ice bucket. It’s a drink synonymous with luxury – perhaps for many people the iconic French wine that suits every special occasion.?

That presents a tough challenge for any champagne label designer - how best to capture the dreamy Champagne landscape that gives birth to the wine? How to build on centuries of tradition and celebration while also bringing something new and exciting to the arena?

So…the latest example in our All4Labels ‘Motherland’ wine labeling showcase gave us the chance to meet this challenge and come up with something particularly special with the aim to offer our sales team a unique way to promote our capabilities.

And now is a good point in time to choose, as the champagne market explodes after COVID. According to Comité Champagne?, shipments of champagne in 2021 rose to 322 million bottles, an increase of 32% over 2020. Mordor Intelligence seems to agree that celebrating is back in fashion and likely to stay that way – they predict a CAGR of 6.2% between 2022 and 2027.

They also cite the trend towards premiumization as a medium-term driver of alcoholic beverage growth (and what could be more premium in the wine market than champagne?).

An interesting new factor is also emerging. As direct-to-consumer portals start to make an impact in the champagne market for the first time, the demands of marketing are shifting. What has always been a product mainly bought at retailers and distributors is starting to be seen online – Mordor says that Champagne Palmer is an early example in April 2020, and Uber Eats is now delivering alcohol too.

For our Tableau Vivant champagne, we used our ‘Motherland’ symbols to represent different aspects of this particular wine such as cold climate, biodynamic cultivation, innovative production, and floral taste.?We chose a Fedrigoni Self-Adhesives Waterproof Ivory FSC? as the label material, giving us a paper that combines arresting aesthetics with excellent resistance to moisture – ensuring no more grey labels in the cooler or ice bucket. Hot stamping using Leonard Kurz gave us shiny metalized effects, and fine touches were added with Alufin? Satingloss micro embossing and H+M relief. 3D metallic doming with silkscreen embossing ensured raised metallic structures, using resin-bonded labels.?

The result is captivating reliefs that play with light. ?

As with other labels in the Motherland project, all artwork and prototyping were provided by our specialist All4Graphics division. Working like that is a great way for us to push boundaries and explore new approaches to design and execution – with creative and production teams working in tandem to change what can be achieved with existing and new techniques.

The end result? I’m pretty confident we’ve done justice to the quality of the wine inside the bottle by making the very most of the label outside. Tableau Vivant is a genuine classic, and it now boasts a bottle to meet that standard.