Christmas Wines of 2017

It's that time again. The wine has been bottled, the labels designed, the story told. And there's no going back, the wine has already made it's way into the food-chain, given out as gifts for Christmas as is our want.

And it's that time again, to thank my brother for all his hard work and warped ideas. I am truly fortunate to have a friend like him.

So without any more beating around the proverbial bush I would like to share with you the labels and stories we came up with this year.

Scarborough Bruff (aka The Blooze)

The funny thing about this Bruff thing is that the label was basically done as something else, a joke really, a poster of myself, because of this guitar I bought. The guitar is a Bohemian electric guitar made partially out of a can. It's a real functioning guitar with knobs and pickups and strings (oh my). When I came across one in my favourite music store I thought to myself that it would be fun to own one so I ordered it.

The guitar company offers a few different designs on the can itself. They have a hot sauce version, a surf wax one, I think a couple of others. The one I liked and ordered was the moonshine design.

I thought it would be cool to have a couple of pictures of myself with the thing so I put on a white shirt, tied a ribbon around my neck as a tie, and put on a dark jacket, oh and my hat and a cheap pair of dark glasses I bought at a dollar store.

I was only intending to have the photographs taken 'waist up' and so I didn't put on any pants.

My son Elliot did the honours (if you want to call it that) of following me around the apartment and taking photographs.

Once I had the pictures downloaded I brought them into Photoshop and started to work on a poster idea. The apartment building next door was having some construction done and this portable outhouse was set up outside. I took a couple pictures of that too and added it to the mix.

And so Scarborough Bruff Live at the Porta-Pot was created.

When it came time to start working on wine labels and stories it became a natural choice, and it looks like this.

Vat 64

Ralph came up with an idea inspired by the Lord of the Rings and the ent character of Treebeard. Now we didn't want to use the name of that character (I guess we could have, just wanted something different) and in trying to think of a new name we threw in the name Bob, basically as a placeholder, but it stuck.

And naturally Ralph wanted squirrels in the story as well.

I went over to Ralph's place and did the photography. He put the longest bar he had on his chainsaw, the 64, managed to find a chain for it, and that's what we shot. I thought originally that the 64 meant something like 64 inches but Ralph corrected me on that, and that would have been one hell of a bar on it anyway.

In order to try to match somewhat the pose on the Bruff label Ralph one armed the saw, not an easy thing to do because the bloody thing is so heavy. Then it all got thrown in to the Photoshop blender and, voila!

For the handout to go with the gifted wines we came up with a couple of simple (and stupid) stories and made them part of a brochure. I wanted the pictures in the brochure to look a bit different than the labels so played around with them a bit.

Here's what the front of the brochure looked like.

And here's The Blooze or Scarborough Bruff.

And the Vat 64 story looked like this.

Hope you enjoyed the labels and stories.

What? 2016 already?

Well, festive greetings, salutations and all that sort of stuff.

I always find it kind of funny the way things come together. Like the whole Campbell Brothers' thing, it's a joke of 21 years' duration now. Wow, that blows me away. And every year it's interesting on how all the little stuff comes together.

If you're reading this then you're probably familiar with our modus operandi. About a month before Christmas we make two batches of wine (and by 'we' I really mean my brother Ralph, he's been doing it for years now, but I'm feeling royal or something): a red one and a white one. We, and here I mean me, then make the labels for each of the batches. We often like to add something as a handout, like the brochure, to tell a story about the Campbell brothers (and now son).

Okay, while I ramble on a bit, let me insert here the wine label we came up with for the red wine.

The Rubber Chicken Band

I think the themes for the labels came easily this year. We didn't even fight. At least no one was bruised or bleeding after the decision making process was completed. Some years it's been a lot harder coming up with this stuff. We agreed on the themes and then had to source costumes and props. We jumped on our collective horse and rode off in all directions.

Then, a week or so before we needed the labels, we got together for a weekend at my place. We hung a sheet up against a wall and took turns photographing each other. It's not very professional, believe me.

For the red wine label Ralph managed to borrow a nice cowboy hat to wear and I dug through some stuff I've been carting around for years and found a couple of other hats. One is a bent up old felt hat left over from a trip I did years ago, and my son Elliot is wearing a bowler I've had for a number of years as well.

The instruments used for the shot were easy to get. I have a number of musical instruments, some that just hang from my wall as decoration (they're not really playable). Elliot in this picture is holding his own acoustic, by far a better guitar than the combination of instruments Ralph and I are holding.

Sadly - and we did look - we couldn't find a rubber chicken the right size, I had to use an image I downloaded from the net. I also downloaded a couple of images for backgrounds to set the body shots against. As a note here we are not a commercial enterprise, we don't make any money from doing this, so I borrowed background images that hopefully fit the theme.

Here's the white wine front label.

Clinical Trial

O.K. For the white wine label, again sadly, we couldn't find a lab coat. I ended up rummaging in my closet and coming up with an old white shirt, part of the uniform I wore for a bus company I used to drive for, that we made perform double duty, as a lab coats for each of us.

I had also gone to the dollar store and blew a couple of dollars on a toy doctor's kit, basically a toy stethoscope and a piece of printed cardboard. We stuffed those in Ralph's pockets.

While we were goofing around doing the photographs I thought it might be cool to have a nurse's hat. I went on line again, found a hat template, downloaded and printed it, then hand painted in the red cross. Still it works, kinda.

Oh, take a closer look at Ralph's head. The headband is actually masking tape wrapped around his noggin' and the fake doctor disk sort of thing (I don't know what it's actually called) is actually a DVD from one of Elliot's game systems also taped to Ralph's head.

We have no pride.

On the back of each bottle of white wine we put another label with the following message.

Campbell Brothers Clinical Trial

and no, I'm not helping you read the small print. I ran out of things to say anyway. I would have loved to have maybe 2 more lines.

Once 'principal photography' was done I got to work on the computer, cutting out each image and assembling the elements into the labels and, again this year, produced a brochure with the story lines we had talked about. Usually, because I work, this takes about a week.

Here's the brochure's front spread.

Brochure - front spread

And the interior spread.

Brochure - inside spread

So then we headed over to Ralph's place to do the bottling which Elliot was good enough to assist us with (he's the official corker). And after the bottling we moved upstairs to his kitchen table, sampled a little more of the wine, and put on all the labels. I had already printed and folded all the brochures so we split up the wine and the brochures and then Elliot and I carted the spoils off home.

Just so you're in on another joke, the guitar the rubber chicken is holding is actually my new guitar, a Fender resonator. I'm learning, after all these years of plucking on strings, to finally play guitar, and I'm learning to play slide (blues style). Another tidbit, Dobro is a trademarked name for a company now owned by Gibson.

Rubber chicken and the Fender.

So now we each have about a case of each wine, labeled, and ready to throw. I mean to gift to an unsuspecting populace.

And that's about it. Hope you enjoyed the posting.