Recently we’ve had some wine and spirits packaging rolling out onto local shelves: All Purpose Shine, Short Cake, and coming soon: Humble Pie, a new cabernet from Nashville-based BNA Wine Group.

With these new roll-outs, we wanted to walk you through a small snapshot of whats it like to work on these from beginning to end — we’ll show you how that went down for new brand Humble Pie.

The Process

Humble Pie aromas are black currant, cherry, vanilla, white pepper and strawberry. It has a wonderful acidity which carries flavors of black currant, vanilla bean, cedarwood and a hint of cigar. We always think about the ingredients in the product before starting any work.

We had fun with the initial research. Ideas to consider included the idiom, “eating crow,” admitting being in the wrong once you’ve made a particular stance; “umbles” were pie served to the lower-class in medieval times. Of course anything remotely related to Game of Thrones gets Aaron excited — and you can probably pick out which label ideas were his.

Step 1: Sketching and Ideation

We began sketching and concepting on several ideas involving cooking utensils, crows, bowing elephants, medieval knights and comical pies with bird feet sticking out of them.

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Step 2: Comps

So often picking and nixing ideas feels like picking your favorite kid. Uh you six can stay, and the rest of you have to go find some other family. We picked our six favorite concepts (which included the winning label).

Step 3: Sit Back & Enjoy

Eventually client was digging a more stripped down concept. So we developed a label that was a minimalistic interpretation of a pie crust and tin, and came up with a nice monogram as well–it was used as part of the capsule.

With all of our BNA wine-label designs, we were fortunate to watch the label application process from Nashville via Tony Leonardini’s (the Napa-based winemaker’s) smartphone. I love the Bill Nye dude in the lab coat applying the labels so meticulously, like this being made in a top-secret lab out in the middle of Albuquerque.

Tony, we can’t wait to see BNA’s newest creation hit the shelves! Here’s a pic of ST8MNT’s owner Bethany Newman enjoying an early taste of Humble Pie with friend Casey Carr.