A crest for your vineyard or winery
Wine labels have used heraldry for centuries. How to design an estate crest for the label, the gate and the cellar door, with a real example.
Wine and heraldry
Walk the wine aisle of any good shop and you will see more coats of arms than anywhere outside a cathedral. Estates put arms on their labels because wine is sold on land and continuity: the same family, the same slope, the same vines. A small vineyard can claim the same language with its own crest.
An estate crest
Illustrative scene made from a real Fable design; not a photograph of a delivered order.
Preview a crest for your estate
Castel Vigna’s arms show towers, a sun and grapes, with the motto Sol et terra, sun and earth. On a tasting card resting on an oak barrel in the cellar, it says everything about the wine before the first glass.
Choose the charges
Grapes and vine leaves are the obvious charges. A sun for the south slope, a tower for an old farmhouse, a river for the valley, a bird that nests among the rows. A short motto in Latin or the local language gives the label a voice.
One crest, many sizes
The crest must work at full size on the cellar door and at two centimetres on a neck label or a capsule. Ask for a simplified version, the shield alone, for the smallest uses.
Labels and the law
Wine labels carry legal information that varies by country: alcohol, volume, origin and allergens among them. The crest sits beside that information, not instead of it. Show your printer the crest early so the label is designed around both.
Beyond the label
The crest earns its keep away from the bottle too. Put it on the sign at the end of the drive, on tasting notes, on the invoices you send to restaurants and on a certificate for a wine club member. Visitors who taste at the cellar door take the tasting card home; with the crest on it, they remember which estate poured the glass they liked.
Start
Fable draws an estate crest from your vineyard’s name and story, free to preview. The Business pack gives you commercial use in writing, brand files and a stationery collection with letterhead, business cards, invoices and certificates. A Fable crest is a decorative emblem, not a grant of arms.