They make puns in French. They make puns in Latin. They insert visual jokes in their artwork only the cognoscenti will find. They like gross out humor. They want you to believe that aliens have been hovering over vineyards in France for decades using cigar-shaped craft and tractor beams. And the French farmers want them to stop. Their most popular offerings feature designs that look like ransom notes. Ransom notes made by funny, erudite, methamphetamine freaks.

Is this any way to brand a multi-million dollar winery? At Bonny Doon, the iconoclastic vineyard run by Randall Grahm, the answer is a definitive maybe. When it comes to marketing, Randall fashions himself “a complete primitive. I have a simplistic ability to market and calculate. We’ve never done a market survey. We don’t even know who our audience is. The point is we have to be ourselves.”

Branding is a concept that winemakers are beginning to understand, and here’s the reason why: Walk into any grocery store and you are confronted with an aisle of wine offering hundreds of choices, ranging from a lowly 2-buck Chuck to a $199 Far Niente. Given those overwhelming options, how does a consumer decide to reach for one bottle over another? Most of us won’t be plunking down the two large for top-shelf cabernet anytime soon, but looking at a hundred linear feet of wine while deciding what bottle of plonk to purchase is a confusing task. And that’s where branding comes in. Savvy graphic designers and illustrators working with a new generation of wine makers are at the forefront of a revolution that’s creating a buzz in the industry.

It includes boxed wine (Bag-in-Box), innovative labeling and alternative packaging. Twist-off caps, designer labels and even canned wines are part of the revolution. Boisset, the French multinational conglomerate, is marketing a line of wines called Lulu B, aimed squarely at the single woman Sex and the City demographic. Its Betty Crocker of wine is a hip young woman who knows what she likes, drinks what she likes, when she likes. Other innovators include Roshambo, a Sonoma County winery that throws rock-paper-scissors contests, drag queen brunches, pirate parties and supports Dave Eggers’s 826 Valencia nonprofit writing lab. There are dozens of wineries up and down the length of California, like Ridge Vineyards, that combine live music with wine-tasting events. Even Target is now in the game with a multicolored wine cube “branded” by famed Napa master sommelier Andrea Immer. If you want to raise your hipness quotient, consider Sofia, the sparkling wine in a can, made by Francis Ford Coppola and named after his famous director daughter. There’s star power for you! But none of these wineries have the track record of hiring premier illustrators and turning them loose to define the brand the way Bonny Doon has.

Wine marketers go to hell
Randall Grahm hates wine marketers. He’s consigned them to the eighth circle of hell, in his own magnum opus of wine marketing called Da Vino Commedia. Also in wine hell are those who espouse wine as part of gracious living, along with wine consultants, technologists and makers of synthetic corks.

The terza rima homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy is lavishly illustrated by Alex Gross. The brochures, in three editions, include tasting notes, a speech Grahm gave at University of California at Berkeley’s 4th Annual Symposium on Neuroesthetics and a jeremiad against wine critics.

Spend any time with Grahm and his creative director John Locke and you come away with the sense of really smart, subversive humanities majors who can’t believe their good fortune to have lucked into the wine industry. And they are passionate about making the most of it. They make the wines they like to drink. “For good or ill,” Grahm says, “our wines have a friendliness, a directness. The tannins are not so hard. They are approachable.”

When it comes to enjoying wine, Bonny Doon wants to lower the barriers to entry. “We want to make wine less foreboding, less onerous. We want to create a dialogue with the consumer. We want them to ask, ‘Why is there a spaceship on this label?’”

The creative briefs come down
Putting a cartoon on the label doesn’t mean the wine is silly, according to Grahm. The labels are the result of creative briefs that communicate the taste of the wine, the price point, and what a consumer can expect in regard to quality.

Five years ago, Toronto, Canada, illustrator Gary Taxali was contacted by creative director John Locke. To get his creative wheels spinning, Locke sent Taxali the following brief about a Syrah Port:

“This is, pretty much as advertised, syrah port to which has been added a small amount of our raspberry liqueur,” Locke wrote. “The internal code name for this beverage is ‘pantelones par abajo’ which translates roughly to ‘pants go down.’ This is some seriously sexy juice for consenting adults only. I could get a date with this stuff. It is very dark. It is very lush. It is very rich. It is very smooooth in that sort of uptown, Night at the Apollo sort of way. Ooohhh yaaaaahhhhhhh. While I am playing the booty card here, the wine will be bottled in a very traditional, old-fashioned bottle that has a little of a taper to it though the product itself is very different from traditional port. We could go very antique with the suggestion of the erotic somehow if we want to go for subtlety.”

Subtlety? Taxali sketched a monkey in a hat looking at a stripper’s go-go boots. Above the monkey’s head rose an empty thought bubble. What’s on his mind? Take a wild guess.

Locke asked for a revision that would include a pair of panties on the monkey’s hat. Taxali talked him out of it, emphasizing the wit of the image would be lost if such an obvious element was drawn in. “OK, Gary” Locke replied, “but you owe us a pair of panties in the next label!”

“What kind of client thinks like that?” Taxali asks. “A priceless one.” The wine would ultimately be called Bouteille Call.

Over the years, Taxali has created more than 45 labels for Bonny Doon, and, as Randall Grahm has hoped, the labels have made a direct connection with consumers. Bonny Doon wine club subscribers e-mail Taxali to tell him they cannot wait to see what he comes up with next.

“The people at Bonny Doon have reminded me of what’s great about being an illustrator,” Taxali says. “Our relationship is one of mutual respect. Bonny Doon is the only client I will accept strange ideas from. I love the challenge with them and I know it’s going to result in a picture I am very happy with. They have sent me crates of wine for my lectures and art shows, own me to Chicago for dinner and a small art show (Randall bought all the work) and, of course, a wine tasting. No other client has gone out of his way to promote my gallery work and been directly responsible for increasing art sales. In my contract, I negotiated that I would receive a crate for every label I illustrate.”