Where there’s smoke,
there’s fire
The Black Summer fires did damage a long way past the fire grounds. Smoke sat over Hunter Valley vineyards for weeks and the fruit drank it in. Smoke taint, it is called. It turns the grapes peaty, bitter, sour, and it makes them worthless.
Best case, tainted fruit disappears into cask wine. Mostly it gets thrown away. A whole vintage written off, and the season’s income with it, on top of everything else those growers were dealing with.
Role: Self-initiated and self-funded, with Taylor Thornton
Year: 2020
Scope: The partnership, brand and design direction, packaging, web, social, PR and media
Credits: Taylor Thornton (creative partner), MIRA Wines, Hunter Valley
Nobody asked
us to
Taylor had the idea. I worked through every wine contact I had until one of them got me to MIRA Wines in the Hunter, sitting on a vineyard of fruit nobody would buy. So instead of it going to waste we made it into something. The Lost Vintage, a rosé from smoke-tainted grapes, with 20% of every bottle going to Pokolbin RFS and the rest back to MIRA to replant for next year.
The branding took its cue from hand-marked cleanskins. Rough at the edges, imperfectly perfect, obviously made by hand, each varietal with its own label drawn from how that particular wine actually tastes. Wine this compromised should not pretend to be something else.
There was no client, no agency and no budget behind any of it. Taylor and I funded it and ran it ourselves, outside our jobs at Host/Havas. Finding the partner, building the brand and every piece around it, the packaging, the website, the social and the calendar to keep it fed, then the PR and the media releases. Nobody commissioned this one and nobody was going to.
