Chronicle / Labels and natural wines
Funny, poetic, graphic, the label of a natural wine never disappoints. But what should we see in this freedom of tone? A protest? A form of renewal? The reflection of a job well done? Or all three at the same time?
Labels have been evolving since the dawn of time, well since antiquity, but you have to admit that the "natural" winegrowers have given the little rectangle of paper on your bottles a new lease of life! They alert, surprise, make you smile and accompany the drinker perfectly. Because beyond the purely aesthetic aspect, the label of a natural wine tells as much about the evolution of consumption methods as it does about the man (or woman) behind the wine.
Jean-Pierre Robinot makes his own labels Since even before knowing the geographical origin of a wine, we enter the sphere of winemaker, who through a drawing, a name of the cuvée, an image expresses his freedom and delivers an aspect of his personality! Better still, it becomes a signature that frees itself from the conventional codes of a wine bottle. The relationship between manual/intellectual, farmer/artist merges and gives, at last, the perfect definition that we wish to allocate to our favourite winemakers. To better understand this phenomenon, we must go back a few years. Deprived of their AOC, some winegrowers could not notify anything on their label, no vintage, no location. They therefore used this sanction to express themselves, the label becoming a field of expression and therefore a reflection of the man, of Winery, of his way of thinking about his wines.
A change of codes?
Obviously, far be it from us to claim that a beautiful and funny label necessarily hides a good wine. NO, that is not the point. Wine remains and will remain the fruit of healthy work in the vineyard and in the vinification, the reflection of a peasant's work. Rigour in the vineyard, boldness and freedom on the label, there we agree! Also, a good wine with a label full of sobriety, tradition and a slightly old-fashioned charm is preferable to the marketing excesses deployed by the bad supermarket wines. Let's prefer substance to form :-) To come back to the form, it is the traditional iconographic rules that have been overturned. The break is clear. The good French composition, framed, horizontal, hierarchical, gives way to dynamic and moving labels. Almost anything goes. Do you want a good pun? No problem. A pink label with a diamond on it? Okay, that's doable. These new fields of possibility set the record straight in the world of wine, often labelled as inaccessible.
Historically, it can even be said that this freedom is similar to that which craft brewers have given to bottled beer, a drink long associated with protesters of all stripes, eager for freedom and anxious to oppose the more 'bourgeois' spirit of wine. The barrier is now falling. Are the symbols and values of fermented grape juice now being challenged? Not necessarily. We can rather talk about redistribution, redefinition and even democratisation. Moreover, this new situation does not (for the moment) have any perverse effects. Fortunately, we can see that the label remains secondary in a customer's choice; above all, they are looking for a healthy, good product, without make-up. The rectangle is seen as a bonus, which can sometimes be used as a wink for a gift or a party.