08/15/2026
I'm not a big w**e drinker. But I love working with local brands. And w**e is one of the hardest things there is to brand.
To most people, one bottle looks a lot like the next. Even people who drink it regularly often can't say exactly why they'd pick one over another. There are a few technical numbers about what's inside (tannin, acidity and so on) and maybe a line or two about the vineyard, and that's about it. So the name, the feeling and the story around the bottle end up doing almost all the work.
A few years ago I got to do exactly that (the full brand and visual identity) for two small Hungarian vineyards. And they needed opposite solutions.
🍷 Serpens
Sándor Zsurki, an award-winning third-generation w**emaker, was launching his own label in Tokaj, the region famous for the golden, honey-coloured w**e that Louis XIV called "the king of w**es, the w**e of kings." That's a beautiful heritage, but heritage alone doesn't make a brand-new label stand out on a shelf. The w**e was excellent and the family had three generations behind it, but the new label had no name yet, and nothing that set it apart.
So I went looking for something that was only theirs. The Bodrog River shapes everything here (the microclimate, the character of the w**e) and it happens to wind through the region like a snake. That was the key. I suggested we build the whole identity around it: the name became Serpens (Latin for serpent, also a constellation), and the river itself became the visual signature, drawn right across the label. Working with designer Enikő Simonyi, we made it elegant and unmistakably high-end, a bottle that signals quality before you've read a single word.
🌿 Fanni Kertje ("Fanni's Garden")
This one came with almost the opposite brief. A younger generation stepping into a family w**e business, who wanted it to feel young, fresh and playful, the opposite of serious, traditional w**e.
So I built the brand around the owner, Fanni, and her own personality, and set the creative direction from there: loose, colourful, cheeky. The w**e names came out of the same idea, like NagyŐKisŐ ("the big one / the little one") and Huncut Fürtök ("Cheeky Curls," since fürt means both a lock of hair and a bunch of grapes). Working with designer Zoltán Novák, we turned that personality into hand-painted labels you couldn't mistake for anyone else's.
I'm sharing this with Ottawa business owners because I think it's the same challenge you have. Your restaurant, your hair salon, your dental clinic: on paper, you can look a lot like the competition down the street. The job isn't to list what you offer. It's to find a fresh angle, a story, a tone, something that's genuinely yours and makes people choose you.
Personally, that's the part I like most. And it's usually more fun with a local business than almost anything else, because there's almost always a real story in there. Most of the time the owner just hasn't said it out loud yet.
