A. A. Badenhorst Shi raz Mourvedre Cinsaul t 2006
All right, let’s just get this out of the way at the start: this month’s guest reviewer is Porky Hefer. Yes, you read correctly. Porky. Hefer. Really.
I meet him at a sweltering sidewalk café, and try to appear trendy amid all the bronzed Camps Bay flesh. Porky, of course, looks quite at home here. Porky is cool. His creative consultancy has recently produced some truly innovative product designs. The latest, “Lite” lights, can be found in the more interesting stores in Johannesburg, Tokyo and Paris. But back to Camps Bay, and our label: Adi Badenhorst’s red blend. The moment it emerges from its packaging, it’s Porky’s eyes that light up.
“That’s beautiful,” he says quietly. “And I like animals, particularly mutant ones – so this three-headed swan is right up my alley.”
He turns the bottle around in his hand. For the first time, I also inspect the label at close range. Its quirky, deliberate naiveté is charming – and the designer has dotted the space with some intriguing and witty symbols.
“The blue feels aristocratic and French,” decides Porky, “which is brilliant because the wine’s from Malmesbury. So there’s a dreamy contradiction there. Good.”
We talk next about the secateurs, on the right of the label’s edge. “These,” suggests Porky, “are like an arrow, pointing out that you should turn the bottle over… to see the fancy stroke of genius on the back.”
Here, the barcode has been brilliantly incorporated into the design – with the tops of each black, vertical line made to look like reeds or cattails. Perhaps to be lopped off by the secateurs? Or maybe they’re there because a river flows through the estate? This is a bit like that old Sunday Times Finders Keepers game. Or an English Lit class, where the mutant swan is a local cipher for Schwaben’s three-headed eagle, a hybridised triumvirate both bowing to, and defying, the paternal trope as it echoes through the ages and…
“May I interrupt your column with a personal gripe?” asks Porky suddenly. Well, why not? Mr Hefer, it seems, has a problem with “bling”: those shiny wine award stickers.
“Say you’ve spent ages crafting a label,” he continues, “and then you’ve got to stick some badly designed medal next to it on the bottle. Or six medals. All those elements and styles start fighting against each other – and the result isn’t pretty. In fact, it looks cheap. So I’m glad the Badenhorsts haven’t done that.”
Th e print techniques are equally unpretentious: just three spot colours, and an ordinary paper stock.
“Ultimately, design should be about headspace not floorspace,” concludes Porky. “This label is a good example: it lives beyond the shelf – in people’s minds. That makes the creative execution very valuable. And it’s a much better way of marketing a product.”
Which brings us to the price. “Oh,” says Porky when I tell him the total. “The bottle might need just a bit of bling then. But it would have to be beautifully designed.”
A. A. Badenhorst Shi raz Mourvedre Cinsaul t 2006: R257.50
