To celebrate our second year in business, we created a limited edition run of a sparkling red Lambrusco dubbed Tavern House Wine for our clients and close agency friends.

When we celebrated our first year of business, the close of 2023, we designed our own Tavern Beer, partly because we wanted a beer client, but also to show what our team is capable of and how we approach a project. Now, we've designed a wine for our second anniversary. It's certainly beer-coded, but it's also very much inspired by dive bars, Italian American social clubs and red sauce joints.

Given our obsession with food, drinks and hospitality, taverns have served as a large point of inspiration for our agency since the start. We modeled some of our agency's branding after the oldest running tavern in the US, Newport, Rhode Island's White Horse Tavern. Taverns aren't sparkly places—they're timeless and feel deeply lived in, and that's a theme that runs through much of the agency's work. For this project, we looked at tavern-adjacent Italian American social clubs and imagined what kind of house wine an establishment like that would serve.

Horses are our unofficially official mascot, and the label features two of them that resemble knight pieces on a vintage chessboard, one for each year we’ve been in business. A bold condensed version of Century Schoolbook is deployed for the Tavern wordmark, giving the mythical establishment an air of class and bygone refinement. That is also because we don’t have one go-to logo in our branding and have chosen to keep it fluid as it changes with the individual concept of a tavern. To add tension, we’ve paired that heritage font with more modern specimens on the label. Minuet is an old typeface used on 70s wine bottles, but we couple it with the faithful Grilli Type Standard. Hidden within you will find vintage seals, overlay stamps, and plenty of label blocking–all elements influenced by our agency's favorite beer labels.

The back label is also highly considered as it adds to the entire experience of the wine. No mere afterthought, it's a ​​modern interpretation of heritage wine label layouts, a necessity as products within this category are typically more costly than your average CPG product and should feel more considered as it's a premium offering.

Better still, we also designed a bottle glorifier that adds a layer of romance to the presentation and sets the stage for the world we have built. Decked out in patinaed brass and embossed with our seal and logo, the horseshoe-shaped glorifier–with a horse on it, naturally–serves a dual purpose as a way to show off the bottle and as an ashtray. Just imagine you're sitting in one of these taverns, and you're at a table with a red tablecloth, and the server brings over the bottle. Yes, it looks simultaneously shitty and classy, but the staff make a great show of it in the unveiling. They cork it, pour your glasses, put it in an ice bucket, and then you have the ashtray. It’s this over the top presentation you won’t get anywhere, a true bygone experience in hospitality.

To top it all off and add that extra gifting note, we even dipped the top of the wine bottle in wax and stamped it with our horse insignia.

The entire package also comes with a membership card to the imaginary Tavern our agency has created, something commonplace at many social clubs to this day, a piece of branded ephemera promising that whoever receives this stately gift is now an official member of Tavern.

We love our clients, but we might be our own best client because we get to show off. We love DIY projects, crafting things by hand, and dipping bottles in wax. It connects us to why we became designers in the first place.