Karl Lagerfeld has designed a wine label and… how can I put this? He’s done better work. Look, everyone has an off day, right, but it looks more like a Karl Pilkington. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.

I’m assuming he just phoned it in so I can only imagine the meeting in Bordeaux when they all got around for the big reveal.

“The printer’s screaming for it. When is he going to going to finish it off?”

“He says it is finished. He says he did it himself.”

“That’s it? He’s having a laugh. Ask him to do it again.”

“Ask him to do it again? What do you mean ask him to do it again? It’s KARL FUCKING LAGERFELD! You ask him to do it again.”

“You’re right. He’s a design god so we can’t ask him to do it again. We’ll have to use it. Merde. Mouton Rothschild never have this trouble.”

“I told you we should have got Philippe Starck. Merde.”

I know it’s only wine, Karl, but show some respect man, it’s a second growth Claret and it’s been around even longer than you have. You’re an icon. You’re a design god. Show us what you can really do with a wine bottle.

Karl Lagerfeld wine label

Um, yes. We did. We won.

For our work with Compass Box, we won best design agency.

We won best label.

We won best tube.

We won best typography.

We won best illustration.

And we won best design agency. I think I already said that.

Full details and pics to follow. This calls for a wee dram. There may be dancing.

And the winner is….actually, we don’t know yet. But we’ve been shortlisted for a handful of awards at the WWDAs so we’ll report back after the event tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s Jack:

Very happy to report that Great King Street, launched last year, has won the Whisky Advocate Award for Blended Malt Whisky of the Year. It was a battle of the bottles between GKS & another great product, Mackinlays. Here’s what they had to say:

‘”..the Mackinlays is all about history and the past. Compass Box Great King Street, a sweet citrusy and vanilla-doused blend, is all about the future. John Glaser and team don’t make bad whiskies, but often they have been esoteric, small batch, and all but unavailable to many of us. This blend is different, and is an attempt by Compass Box to introduce quality blends to a new generation. It had a relatively modest price point and brought the artisan skills of Compass Box to a new audience. It’s that rarity: a blend that drinks well on its own but tastes great when mixed. More than that, it’s perfectly placed to bring blends back into vogue. Anyone for a highball?”  —Dominic Roskrow

Yes please to that highball.

Every now and again, along comes a brief that makes us swoon. It goes something like this: you decide. So we did.

30,000 cases.

$9.99 per bottle.

Sold out in six weeks.

Some things don’t last forever. Luckily there are plans to make more. We can’t wait.

Some of you might remember the *cough* award-winning Absinthe we produced for Christmas 2010. It was a difficult one to follow but after some thought we decided to do something to celebrate our USA office opening. We’d noticed a lot of moonshines appearing but wanted something a little more ‘snake oil’. More lo-fi, if you like. Writing ads for the paper bag it comes in was a blast, then there’s about 500 words on the bottle alone. My particular favourite is ‘for reliable fire lighting and sterilising of wounds’. As you can imagine we’re having some issues registering the label with the TTB for the production run. Watch this space.

Until then, we give you Spirit 13.

Thankfully we don’t rely on statistics to do what we do. We rely on people and ideas. Having said that, we love an illuminating statistic that shows we’re doing something right. According to recent UK wine market data, of the total top 20 wine brands only two are in growth. Two. They are Ogio & McGuigan, growing 42% & 27% in volume respectively, over the last year.

We did those labels.

In a market where consumer spending is down and people are drinking less, it is indeed possible to go against the grain. Or should that be grape?

After the recent forum, the Harpers website reported that Stranger saw such little innovation in wine that we’d offer free branding to an innovative wine based beverage.
That was quickly picked up by sites in the USA and the response crashed my email. If I had a hat I’d eat it. Washed down with an innovative wine based beverage MADE IN THE USA!

We’ve had a few UK responses and in March a brand new wine product will launch in the UK. We’re very excited. I’m about to pick the second and I’m prepared to roll out this initiative so please send in your NDAs and lets do something more interesting than just another wine.
The most heartening thing about all this has been the response that we’ve had from multiples who have pledged shelf space and want to make a difference. I hope we can keep the momentum rolling so that the wine shelves can be as interesting to normal people as the beer and spirit shelves.

See what I did there? I said normal people. Can we please forget for one minute the Chinese and their first growths and cola and remember that we are trying to sell products to your nephew and my auntie and for them a good example of a claret is some red wine in a bottle with the word claret on it.
There are 5,000 average merlots available to the public in the UK. Average. Not merlot for just drinking, not merlot to go with food, not fizzy merlot for parties, merlot to keep you sober, merlot to get you drunk, merlot for women, merlot for men, merlot to make you look cool, merlot in plastic to take to the beach, not really light merlot, not even merlot beer. No, just 5,000 average looking merlots all in the same bottles that bang on about the terroir and claim to go with meat.

No wonder most normal people just go for the cheapest. They can’t relate to any other differentiator. Wine isn’t complex but we’ve made it complex. It is time to forget about old world and new world and talk about real world.

The Britvic guy at the forum said that if we in the wine trade worked in any other FMCG sector we’d all be fired.

Let’s prove him wrong.

I was thinking the other day about a breakfast wine.

I’ve spent the last month in airport hell – 31 time zones in 25 days – and my stomach’s yearnings have been distinctly out of kilter with the beverages on offer. Ok, I see breakfast sausages before me but my stomach thinks it’s evening and it thinks we deserve a drink, and yet the only acceptable form of beverage seems to be a breakfast Bloody Mary. You can’t really pull off a breakfast beer unless you work on a meat market and I’m not in the mood for cheap breakfast fizz but what a shame there isn’t a low alcohol all day grape based snack for me to sup. Hell, it’d almost be one of my five-a-day.

Well, there isn’t of course because I’m talking about the UK wine business and wine only comes in wine shaped bottles full of wine.

I’m in London to talk at the Harpers / Wine Option forum where the great and the good of the wine business sat to sort out the British industry. I got there in the morning, although it was evening for my stomach and I, and they were only serving coffee. It went on for three hours and after the Sopexa woman said ‘Problem? What problem? We’ve done really well’ and the Thierry’s guy said that the ‘UK consumer was at capacity’ a few of us tried to raise the bar and the subject of how to better engage consumers, learn from other industries and move forward with new products and better social media (see Helen McGinn’s Knackered Mother’s Wine Club) so that the shelves are more than just the homogenous blur of 5,000 – true story! –  cheap white label merlots.

That lasted a few minutes before the conversation turned around to how well Bordeaux has done and the price of burgundy. It’s true, there are a few top houses that are doing very well but there are way more smaller ones that are ripping up their vines and replacing them with subsidized corn.

I said at one of these things a few years ago that the wine industry was a bunch of Ferrari mechanics trying to run a Ford dealership and I’m afraid that I have to report that nothing much has changed. Except when I said that we were the daddy. We WERE the daddy. People used to fly across the world to gawp at the majesty of our wine aisles, the audacity of the labels, the championing of so many brave new worlds.

These days, not so much. I hear from so many people who just can’t be bothered with the UK wine business any more and would rather travel to China. They make more margin everywhere else and they don’t have to go through our buyer system where a handful of supermarkets weald all the power and have no interest or need to think beyond the status quo or the lowest common denominator. Why should they? Competing with THEIR competitors is the main topic of their meetings and so they’re quite happy to let all the producers chase the same bids with the same juice and fight over the margins. I get that.

The only way to stop the wine trade eating itself is through innovating new products that consumers will pay a premium for. I’ll give you an extreme example. Someone in South America brought out a low alcohol fluorescent wine. That’s right, it glows in the dark. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, your pee glows in the dark too. Funny eh? Grown, albeit young, men playing with their light sabers. Yes, but it sold 12 million cases in Argentina alone. I’ve been designing wine labels in the UK for 17 years and no-one has ever come to me with a product for the younger market. They’re just too busy sniffing and spitting and I don’t mean the younger market.

I talked about how Anthony Von Mandel, the (now billionaire) creator of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, said that innovation was his life’s blood, and how buyers in the USA are trying new stocking and shelving ideas to interest jaded consumers and looking for innovation – two major chains in the past week – and yet the UK has still not actioned any of the consumer research that came out ten years ago. The only way I can tell what year it is in the UK wine trade is by looking at the vintage on the bottles.

It’s just not good enough. We can do better than this and, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m again calling for more innovation in wine and I’ll put my money where my mouth is. We’ll brand up, for FREE, one job a month as long as it’s an interesting wine product. That’s right, a normally very expensive, high kudos Stranger & Stranger brand job for FREE as long as it isn’t a bland product.

Just don’t ask me for a Blossom Hill rip off.

Please submit any ideas to Morgan by emailing strangerfree@strangerandstranger.com

One of the perks of my job is being surrounded by creative people and ideas – we are doing some lovely work with beers right now – but our Polish designer, Ewa, has just launched a website for our new Polish vodka pack that is so stripped down lo-fi and full of character that it has charmed everyone and it stands out a mile from the slick branded online ‘experiences’ that we’re all used to these days.

www.davnavodka.com