last updated 10/27/2024
A while back I was looking through my wine labels and considered how my designs have changed over the decades. On the right are links to posts that showcase my labels.
Note: For many years my labels were very pedestrian. However, in the last few years things changed greatly for the better.
My Label Making History
My Labels
My first wines were not labeled. I made one batch each year, and it was consumed before the next year’s wine was bottled. Labels were unnecessary.
In September 1987 I got my first PC, a Zenith Z-100, courtesy of Clarkson University. I used some long forgotten program to create labels, using whatever grainy art I could find, and printed on plain paper in a dot-matrix printer. In the post-2020 world this doesn’t sound all that impressive, but at the time, it was amazing!
I didn’t make wine for a few years as we moved around too much, but in the mid-90’s I got back into winemaking. I found a program, written by a mid-40’s guy who was in college, in the process of switching careers to IT. The program worked well enough for making labels, and I paid the ~$25 fee. This worked for a few years, until he apparently got his degree, scrapped his email address, and stopped supporting the program. It had a complicated registration key, which stopped working, meaning I could not launch the program.
THIS was a good lesson on not getting locked into someone else’s proprietary format.
All my previous labels were lost to me — I had the files, but could not open them. I was seriously angry with the dude, not because the program stopped working, but because I lost my work. This affected my future attitude towards many things.
After that I used Microsoft Word to create labels. I tried various graphics programs, and they were all better for arranging labels, but didn’t scale the label across the page. MS Word was good enough, and I wasn’t making any where near as much wine as I did before I got married.
In 2006 I found Avery’s Design & Print. This did exactly what I needed — I could create a single label using a template for a specific type of Avery media (e.g., 10 labels per page, 2 across and 5 down) and it would scale the design across all cells. The graphics management was a bit crude, but it worked quite well.
The drawback? It saves the files in Avery’s proprietary format.
My solution? When a label is done, in addition to printing labels for the bottles, I print
- a copy to PDF (generic format) so that I can print the labels if I want
- a single label to JPG or PNG format (also generic formats)
- a “tinified” copy of the single label; I use the TinyPNG web site to produce a more compact file for web usage
This leaves me with the original Avery file, plus 3 other copies in generic formats. While I expect Avery to support their format, my trust in any business entity is zero.
Note: A few years back, Avery discontinued their desktop application in favor of their online program. I don’t like the online program as it doesn’t allow as much fine control, but it would work if that’s all I had, and it reads/write the same file format. I’ll keep using the desktop application until it no longer works.
My Labels
Originally I published all my labels in a single post, but the post kept getting longer and longer, and with all the graphics, loading time also got longer and longer. So I broke the posts up by year. Links are in the sidebar to the right.
An important note — labels are presented in the order created, which means “year” is the year the wine is bottled, NOT the year it was started. This shows a truer progression of how my labels changed over time.