Wine · Illustrated series
Kosmos
— a wine series that reads as one story
The challenge
A premium wine series built around space — not a category that goes there often. The client came in with one line already fixed in his head: “Space isn't black. Space is grey.”
Each wine already had a name. Взгляд. Контакт. Astridu. Vacuum. What didn't exist yet was one language that could hold them together.
The face
Grey became the ground for every label — one accent colour per bottle, enough to hold tension against it. Every wine got its own illustration, its own hand-drawn lettering, its own label shape. No shared die-line, no repeated pose.
On Взгляд, an astronaut rides Leonardo da Vinci's ornithopter through a swirling sky — line work first, colour second. On Astridu, the grey opens into a glass dome, and inside it, colour: grapes growing on a planet that isn't Earth.
What stayed,
what changed
Stayed — across the series
Grey as the ground. Hand lettering on every label. A shape cut for that bottle alone.
Changed — every bottle
The drawing. The accent colour. The story each label carries.
That's the system: one grey language, disciplined enough to carry nine different worlds without losing the thread.
The story
It reads in order, if you let it.
Взгляд first — humanity has looked up and dreamed since antiquity. Then Контакт, searching for someone else out there. Then Он общий — no borders left; together is the only way through.
Then Vacuum. Man finally leaves, and space doesn't care. Not a crown of creation out here — a speck of dust in the infinite. What pulls him back is Casa: a Christmas ornament shaped like Earth, hung in the cockpit. A wish for home, before he's gone for good.
Then Astridu — he builds a dome and grows grapes under it, a different colour than at home, but grapes. Colonising, one glass at a time.
And last, Inseme. Footprints in the dust of a dead planet, in the foreground. On the horizon, a father and his son — the father still in a suit, the son isn't. Somewhere between those two figures, the planet stopped being dead.
The world.
Off the shelf, the labels kept showing up — a wine magazine cover, a tasting-room banner, a spread in print. Not staged. Found.
The result
Nine labels, produced together in the spring of 2021. The series is closed: it was designed as a set and finished as one.
The drawings outlived the bottles. They ran in a magazine about the series, and went up on the walls of the winery's office and its presentation hall — printed large, a long way from any label.
Want one of these
for your own range?
Tell me what you're making and what comes after it. I'll tell you which chapter it is — and if it isn't a fit, I'll say so.