Mereworth Wines
Raising the bar for English sparkling wine
Client
Mereworth Wines produces award-winning English sparkling wine, as well as other premium drinks, from the fruit they grow in their own vineyard in Mereworth, Kent. Innovative and impassioned, their sparkling wines have even outperformed well-known Champagne brands in blind taste tests.
Challenge
Mereworth wanted their brand to be a modern classic— a simple, unique and recognisable identity that would last for decades without changing. It had to unite all of their current and future products as well as convey the brand characteristics of exceptionally high quality, precision and honesty. It needed to look and feel expensive and be worthy of their award-winning drinks and premium prices.
Approach
We started work on the Mereworth brand by thinking outside the bottle. We looked to time-honoured English brands as well as premium Champagne brands (including Dom Perignon and Bollinger) and sought to identify what it was about the branding itself—quite apart from the products—that felt refined and classic. We identified a number of characteristics including simplicity, idiosyncrasy and modesty.
The core ideas in our final solution arrived as a result of this process. We then created dozens of iterations, working closely with Mereworth founder William Boscawen who introduced a master-stroke of his own. In order to make his sparkling wine a truly English product, he wanted to avoid the use of French terminology on the labels (unlike all other English producers). Thus, ‘Blanc de Blancs’ became ‘White from White’ and ‘Blanc de Noirs’ became ‘White from Black’. This idiosyncratic naming strategy dovetailed perfectly with our ideas for a classic modern design.
Results
We sought to achieve an immutable design with the use of a simple circle—the ‘Mereworth halo’—rendered in copper foil. Crucially, research showed no other competing drinks brand using this device in the same way. Our design appears modern, clean, and confident.
The fine foiled lines just inside the outer copper circle are inspired by the time-honoured refinement of horology (a marker for luxury) and their width was specified—after consultation with the printer, Royston—to be as thin as it was possible to accurately foil. The subtle blind embossing inside the circle also extends as close to other finishes as is possible and lends a delightful tactility to the labels. Finally, precise varnishing raises the surface and adds gloss to the Mereworth brand name at the circle’s centre. By pushing the printing technology to its limits, the labels achieve a rare level of refinement.
Mereworth loves their new brand identity and its application across their range of drinks. It’s a hit with their customers too.
