Wine Labels and Stories for Christmas 2008

Introduction:

Well, it's been a while but here we are back again with this years new crap, I mean crop, of labels and stories. I hope you enjoy them.

It's been a weird year for us, my brother Ralph and I. Many things have changed since the last posting, but some things are hard (if not down right impossible) to put down, like a flu epidemic or plague. The tradition of the Campbell Brothers' Christmas wine has become one of those things it seems, and so, without further ado or eggnog, it's on to the labels and stories themselves.

Engineer Behind Wine (2008)

Ralph wanted to do something a bit different for the storyline of one of the Christmas wines this year. He wanted to make what you might call a commemorative label and so dedicated the story to one of the people he had known while he worked for a sawmill in the north.  The story came out basically as you see it and as he related it to me. The image for the label itself was pulled from a couple of sources on the net and combined using my old friend Photoshop. Ralph also contributed a couple of his own shots from up north, of the logging truck and the snowshoes in the snow, which were also added. This is the label and the story of Engineer Behind (which was printed in a brochure format).

Here's the label:

 

The front cover of the brochure started with:

The Campbell Brothers Present...

Engineer Behind 

(again with the picture of the dozer stuck in the bog)

One of the many misadventures of Ralph Campbell, known then as Ralph of the bog.

On the inside of the brochure the story started:

This is a true story, the names have not been changed because nobody is innocent.

This is decanted to the memory of one Lucien Lemetang (and I hope I spelled his name right). He is remembered fondly, even after all these years. I hope his spirit rests in peace.

Lucien has the right to be called a character. The reason for this is because that’s what he was, a real character. He was a hard working, hard living, wiry man who worked up north in the bush for a sawmill company (like the one that had just hired me). Lucien had no family, at least that he knew of, and his way of life was to work incredibly hard in the bush, driving bulldozer, for maybe three months at a time, and then take the next three or four weeks off to get drunk and hang out, basically to live, in a brothel until all the money ran out and he had to go back to work. That was his life.

But Lucien was a good friend to me. He helped this young English Canadian come up from Southern Ontario, a guy still wet behind the ears, a collage kid just graduated from school. Well, Lucien was my teacher there, or one of them, and from him I learned about logging, and working with people.

Not long after I started with the lumber company the order came down from the owner to move the cutting crews to a new cutting area. We had two days, Lucien and I, to make a logging trail and a landing site (for the rough cut timbers to be collected).

Early one morning a flat bed truck dropped off the D-6 bulldozer at the beginning of the new cutting area and then left. Lucien and I, who had driven out in a pick-up truck to the site, got out and readied ourselves for work. I turned to Lucien and told him that I wasn’t too sure about how to go about this (rough dozing a trail). He turned to me and said in his heavy French accent, “Hokay den, I teach you to be engineer behind.”

And I said, “What?”

And he said, “Yeah, you stay dere behind the bulldozer with the photograph, map and compass (a compass, by the way, doesn’t work very well on or near a bulldozer because of all the metal) and tell me which way to go? Hokay?”

Truck on a logging road

So we started to make a trail through the bush, me walking behind the D-6 with my map and my compass trying to figure out where we were and what direction to go. Lucien was busy ahead of me building the trail (de-building the forest) and he would look back at me every once in a while to see which way he should go; right, left, or straight ahead.

For the first couple of hours things went great until I missed a turning point. Instead of making a turn we went straight…straight into a bog. I soon learned where the expression ‘to get bogged down’ came from. It happened so quickly it was unbelievable.  Black bog mud came up over the bulldozer’s tracks and the dozer sank up to its belly pan in the muck. Muck rhymes with stuck, and with another choice word that I’ll refrain from using here.

Lucien tried as hard as he could to get the bulldozer out but it kept sinking further and further into the bog. There was a look in his eye which seemed to say, ‘Look what dis #*&%@* stupid English person done to me and my baby’. He didn’t say much to me after that, only a couple of times, to direct me in what he wanted done.

In doing soil classifications you try to describe the type of soil you’re looking at. For example, in describing a bog the description might be a ‘peaty muck’ or a ‘mucky peat’, but this stuff was either a ‘crappy muck’ or a ‘mucky crap’, or what we call, in layman’s terms, ‘loon shit’, and that’s the way it smelled and the way it felt. It oozed in everywhere and into everything. It seeped into your clothes like India ink. And did I mention the smell?

The way we eventually got out, after about three hours of backbreaking and dirty work, was that we cut small trees and kept feeding them under the tracks of the D-6 and slowly walked it backwards out of the bog until we got to solid ground.

Once out, I climbed on top of the D-6 and we started to follow our trail out of the bush. It seemed like hours that I sat beside him and watched as he operated the controls. He never said a word, he just steamed. The look in his eye made my heart and soul sink further and further (like a dozer in a swamp). Even though I was a big lad I felt pretty small right then. We finally got back to the road, cleaned the mud off the tracks of the dozer before it froze there, and still not a word from Lucien.

We were sitting in the truck, just about to start back for home, when Lucien poured himself a cup of coffee from his thermos, took a sip, and pointed to the D-6 and said, “You know dat yellow ting over dere? It no submarine.”

And that’s the story of my first experience of being an engineer behind.

S

One night, a few years later, when it was -40 below (and it doesn’t matter whether you use Celsius or Fahrenheit, they’re both the same) and Lucien was quite drunk, he went outside of his little shack in the bush to take a piss. He passed out and, as they say, when he woke up he found himself frozen and quite much dead. It wouldn’t take long at that temperature. You could have used him as a plank on a logging bridge.

Sigh. He’ll be missed very much.

And that is why this wine is dedicated to Lucien. I hope that you will raise a glass in his honour.

And that's it. I really liked the story and even though it's a departure from what we usually do I think it works well.

Sacrilegious Wine (2008)

The second idea that we came up with was much more typical of the genre (Hey, do we get to be a genre now? Cool.) and had to deal with the merry mayhem caused by the Campbell brothers throughout a rather warped version of history. In this one they actually got to be brother brothers.

Sadly I never did get to use all the gag lines that I wanted to use for this. Space restrictions and translation problems conspired to make me stick to the 'kiss' precept, (keep it simple, stupid). I spent considerable time trying to wrestle the story I imagined into proper latin but often came up against a 'you can't get there from here' wall of verbal frustration. I had found a site on the net that translates words and phrases from english into latin but had difficulty making it say what I wanted, getting the concepts across. I am no latin scholar, that's for sure.

Anyway, I also did some searching on the net for illuminated manuscripts and found a couple I liked. I selected one and tried just sort of bulk erasing the text that was there and adding my own but it looked really cheesy. I ended up stripping out the elements that I liked from the manuscript and spent a lot of time just cleaning them up in Photoshop, the edges and detail and all. Then I pasted them back onto a fresh page where I could play with them, stretching and positioning to fit, and then layered in my type(s), the latin text complete with woodcut first letters, a nice sort of celtic/churchy font, then put some of that text in red (for the juicier bits), then I added the translated text in another font on the opposite side of the page (trying to line up one with the other), and then added the page footer in a third font. I had some nice textured paper, a bit reminiscent of parchment, that I printed the design onto for the handouts to go with this wine.

For the label, again I did research on a number of cloisters and abbeys that I thought might look good. Then I added a bit of smoke and fire to the view outside of the colonnade and added in the type. Ralph had come over one day for a visit and brought with him the robe which we took turns donning and then took turns photographing one another. We have little in the way of self respect it would seem.

I don't think anybody will realize just how much work goes into making one of these things. All for fun, not for profit.

So, to the label and the story.

Cam Beul Frater - Sacrilegus Vinum

Here is the label:

And the handout looked like this.

Because the type is impossible to read I’ll include it here. First the Latin (on the left side):

Frater,

Is est per gravis pectoris ut ego loco calamus charta. Mestitia venio nobis. Nostrum monestary, nostrum carus refugium, nostrum domus redigo sepelio. Quicumque somes es acervus, congeries tutela calx.

Duos frater es penitus procul mendum. Duso erant desolo procul sicco ianua, indutus ut parvulus vel sententia videlicet ultum senior. EGO puto iam malum cam beul frater , ut erant notus , erant iustus vultus parumper locus occulto.

Quis es suum vitium?

Bellator , usura blasphemus lingua , ulterius , conicio feces , quod quicumque iustus procul invicem.

A erroris eram no per sino lemma futurus dispensatio of vinum . Vinum eram perussi . Monachus erant tunc servo quispiam fere penitus non amo vinum , sapor amo piscis , quod dat cursor diarrhoea , quod ut est iustus pro satus . Is quoque distraho imbibo vas.

Pugna in crustulum cella quod coepi incendia ut pessum ire nostrum domus eram quoniam duos frater , illa Cam Beuls , attributa ut crustulum pro dies , erant oro super quisnam est futurus piscis piscis friar quod quisnam chip monachus.

Quam anser eram paro in flamma may nunquam exsisto notus.

EGO teneo nos es remitto alius tamen alieno ut, nos mos non verto ceterus letifico . Nos postulo ut deleo orbis terrarum illae vomica. Is est quare EGO scisco vos ut planto lemma excommunicates.

 

And the English translation (on the right):

 

Brother,

It is with heavy heart that I put pen to paper. Misfortune has befallen us. Our Monastery, our beloved refuge, our home, has been reduced to ruin. All that remains are a heap of charred stones.

Two brothers are entirely at fault. The two were abandoned at out door, dressed as infants even though clearly much older. I believe now the evil Campbell (literally crooked  ‘cam’ mouth ‘beul’) brothers, as they were known, were just looking for a place to hide.

What are their crimes?

Fighting, using blasphemous language, farting, throwing feces, and all that just at each other.

A mistake was made by allowing them to be stewards of the wine. The wine was consumed. The monks were then served something almost entirely not like wine, tastes like fish, and gives runny diarrhea, and that is just for starts. It also dissolves the drinking vessels.

The fight in the cooking room which started the fire that destroyed our home was because the two brothers, these Campbells, assigned as cooks for the day, were arguing over who is to be the fish friar and who the chip monk.

How the goose was set on flames may never be known.

I know we are to forgive others but forget that, we will not turn the other cheek. We need to erase the world of this plague. This is why I ask you to make them excommunicates.

And at the bottom of the page the footer reads:

Part of a scroll and lay translation found in the archives of the Order of St. John Incredibilis Foetidus (the Incredibly Smelly) located in Rome. The name Cam Beul has become synonymous with shoddy work, unpalatable wine, and a particularly nasty and pernicious little infection that grows between toes.