Responses by Zulu Alpha Kilo.
Background: Located in the Niagara wine region of Canada, Henry of Pelham is one of Ontario’s best-selling producers and was even declared Ontario’s number-one winery at the 2024 National Wine Awards. Despite these accolades, its quality has been unfairly dismissed, as many wine lovers don’t perceive Ontario wines to be world-class. Our mission was to change their minds and boost quality perceptions of Henry of Pelham wines. Knowing history adds value to wine, we believed Henry of Pelham’s untold 200-year story could be the ultimate proof of quality.
Design thinking: We wanted to tell Henry of Pelham’s 200-year history in a creative, meaningful way. In our exploration, we discovered an experimental film processing technique called “Wineol,” which enabled us to develop photographs using Henry of Pelham’s own wine. Drawing from the winery’s vast collection, we selected 50 artifacts and turned their images into one-of-a-kind, drinkable works of art by tipping the original photos onto the labels. Inspired by the archiving process, each label documents an artifact, its story and the wine used to create it—a beautiful marriage of history and winemaking.
Challenges: Getting the chemistry right in the darkroom was the biggest challenge. It took plenty of trial and error, with many failed attempts, to get the most color from each wine varietal while achieving the right contrast in each photo. Even once we had the process dialed in, it took days of resetting, remixing and refining. As the wine sat, it changed the results—creating slight tonal variations from image to image and ultimately added to the eclectic charm of the overall project.
Favorite details: In a time when production is becoming increasingly automated, we’re especially proud of the amount of handcrafting that went into this project. To reinforce the archival nature, we layered four different substrates: cotton, vellum, recycled fibre and soft touch to create the label. We also used techniques such as custom die-cut tabs, blind debossing, side-sewn binding, thermography, glass etching and hand numbering. Every bottle was then individually dipped in molten wax, one by one. No shortcuts—just a lot of hands-on work, like the wine itself.
New lessons: We were delighted to learn that you can, in fact, develop photos using wine. We didn’t know that, and we imagine many people don’t!
Visual influences: The research and archiving process that’s a part of so many museums and art galleries informed the design language overall, from the different stocks used all the way to the layered tabbing system. This invites the wine drinker to discover the history behind the very wine they’re drinking.
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