Our first attempt at a label for the now notorious Campbell Brothers Christmas wine was straight ‘cut and paste’. I cut out a magazine ad of a, you guessed it, Campbell’s soup can (Cream of Asparagus if you’re interested), and taped onto it a piece of paper containing the (very primitive) type elements. The resulting paper sandwich was then colour Xeroxed a number of times and glued onto the wine bottles in our home-style production line.
This reproduction is from a scan of the original artwork.
The wine itself was one of those fruity and light German things with almost unpronounceable names, like Gwerzitraminer or Liebfromilch, something along those lines. The name we applied to the concoction, Gesuntheit, seemed to fit the bill perfectly, evoking the sunny hillside fields of grapevines coupled with an explosive expectoration (sneeze).
After all these years I just now took the time to look the word gesuntheit up in my old Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. I just wanted to see if it was there and also check on what the book says is the meaning of the word.
Much to my chagrin it seems that I spelled the word wrong in the first place. Our first joint venture and I made an error (and it wouldn’t be the last). Sadness and lamentation. Merriam Webster says that the word is gesundheit. It gives it a ‘d’ in the middle, I gave it an ‘a’. The word means literally ‘health’ in German, and is used to wish good health especially to one who has just sneezed.
But maybe you knew all that.
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