U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi, you’re UGLY!!!

I don’t mean YOU you, but this or that wine label…

As you may or may not know, I purchase wines for The Wine Library across many different categories - all are located in the Old World - Italy, select parts of France, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Greece, etc. And as you might expect, the WINE ITSELF is always the primary factor determining whether I purchase a wine for the shop or not, but as you also might expect, quality to price ratio, type of wine, continuity of supply, etc. are all considerable factors as well. But when I tell friends and customers that wine LABELS are an important factor in ultimately saying “yes” or “no” to wine, many say “Really”? and I always say “Oh, yes”!

Think about it…One wine’s label has a beautiful etching of an idyllic chateau with elegant, colorful lettering all printed on a fine, bone-colored paper stock. Another’s label is a thin, shiny, plasticized material written in a goofy, awkward font (which is smearing and scuffed), and depicts a dead bird. OK, admittedly a hyberbolic pair of examples, but there are indeed wines that I have eventually rejected not JUST because of a hideous label, but if a wine is (let’s say) DELICIOUS, and fairly priced, but is hopelessly obscure or is a proprietary blend (they are harder to sell), and the label is AWFUL, I probably will NOT buy that wine for our shelves. In my mind, a bottle of wine either does or does not reach a certain sales-oriented “critical mass” that will either tip the drinker to buy or not buy a wine, and the nature and appearance of a wine’s label figures prominently in that equation…

As the line from the old commercial goes: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, and this works in spades for wine labels. I have seen on more than one occasion a customer lift up a bottle to more closely examine/read it, see what I always thought to be an UGLY label, wrinkle his or her nose and scowl, and put the bottle back in place. And while I can’t PROVE that the label caused the rejection, it stands to reason that not much else COULD have - they didn’t just taste the wine and dislike it, so it couldn’t have been that, and they were initially attracted enough to the grape variety, or the wine’s place of origin, or even the wine’s price point, to take that closer look but STILL did not purchase the wine. Once again, there is hardly a guaranteed and ironclad connection, but the aesthetics of a wine’s label at least indirectly represents what many people believe about what they can expect from the bottle’s contents. Right or wrong, this is the calculus…

So, I like to think that I haven’t bought a slew of HIDEOUSLY-labelled wines, but just like there are wines that I reject BECAUSE of their labels, there have been more than a few that I have indeed purchased DESPITE their aesthetically-challenged appearances. Here are a few OUTSTANDING wines that don’t get the attention that they deserve due to their ugly duckling looks. All of these wine are beautiful where it really counts - on the INSIDE, so give these something-less-than-covergirl packages a chance to open up and reveal their highly charming personalities on your table…

TOM CIOCCO

Ugly label, GOOD wine #1

Ugly label, GOOD wine #2

Ugly label, GOOD wine #3

Ugly label, GOOD wine #4

Ugly label, GOOD wine #5

Ugly label, GOOD wine #6

Ugly label, GOOD wine #7