Marketing wine - does the label matter

Question

Living in Spain one tends to get used to good plonk at good prices. However, now that I am based (for the time being) in the Canary Islands I come across a lot of Canarian wines. One cannot call them plonk, firstly, they are somewhat superior to the average table wine on the mainland, also they have very fancy bottles and labels. Now I understand that there is a lot of tourism here and a lot of this wine is bought to take home as gifts - so what percentage of the final cost (to the paying public) can be attributed to fancy labels and bottles - or is this wine really more expensive to produce?

Answer 1

I know wineries that spent huge amounts on a label design and others that keep it super simple with just text and no graphics. The sky is the limit on designing a label. I had to spend about $1000 USD to have a decent label designed. Then printing it on really high quality paper cost $$$$. I was charging between $30-$50 a bottle for my wine.

I was spending around $0.25 a label, $.40 a cork, $.50 tin capsule and about $0.75 a glass bottle. I can only imagine that production costs on the Canary islands are probably double that because it costs so much to ship that stuff to the islands.

Packaging costs become less of a factor the more expensive your wine is. For me it was about $3 per bottle. If you wine costs $10 then it's a huge percentage. If you are charging $50, then it becomes less of an issue.

Wine labels are like snowflakes, not two are alike and why someone would choose eye popping graphics for a low production wine from the Canary Islands, I have no idea. Those usually are reserved for supermarket level wines so you are compelled to pick it up off the shelf.

If fact, If you look at the most expensive wines in the world. They have very conservative labels. 10 most expensive labels