What and who is behind our labels

Our wine labels have our golden W in a ring, but also a red arrow. That is our West pointing arrow. The west pointing arrow in a compass rose. Please always place our bottle so the arrow points west and you know where you are . We picked West as the name because we are West of everything. Our Cabernet vineyard is high up on a west facing slope west of West Dry Creek road.

For our two most recent labels we have engaged a creative young designer, Linnea Gidlof, who we started working with when she was at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. For our champagne style sparkling I had a notion of the frothy foams at sea and gave it the name Seafoam. Linnea picked up on this and created a beautiful turquoise label with gold and a hint of waves and bubbles. Very modern and classy. So obviously I turned to her when we just finished making our first Grappa, Seafire. She chose a beautiful orange color which goes so well with the gold capsules and the clear liquid.

Our very first label, 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon, was based on a wood print that our daughter made when she was 11 years old. Here it is. Valhall Vineyards called after Valhall, the hall of the Nordic gods, where they ate and drank in eternity. It is still the names of our vineyards, even though our wine brand is now West Wines.

We then changed the brand to West Wines and used a west pointing arrow, part of a compass rose as a symbol and our first label for West was created for the 2003 vintage of Cabernet Sauvignon. We only used it three years. Here is the 2005 vintage, which was served at the Nobel awards banquet.

As we started making other wines, Chardonnay, Viognier, red blends we needed a design that would work with different wines. The current label allows us to have a color code for each wine and the border color on the label match the capsule. It makes it easy to pick the right bottle even if it only the capsule sticks out form the wine rack.