Christmas Wines 2023

Intro

Seasons greetings to one and all. 

This year was a strange one, likely in part because of that whole covid fiasco and what it's done to us all. Without going into all the details of that I'd like to present something a bit more pleasant, the wine stories and labels we came up with for this year.

Wine

My brother and I got together for a couple of picture shoots for this years wine labels and stories. In the one it shows us sitting on the porch of an old building in Goodwood, Ontario (I'm told it was one of the sets for the Schitz Creek series). I liked it so much that I sent the picture to my friend Sid in BC who did the black and white conversion and added type. We liked that version of the photo so much that it immediately became the label for one of the wines. 

 

I played around with the type a bit more, added the wine bottle to the porch and voila, there it was.

For the story line we flushed out (or just plain flushed) a story about the two incompetent musical brothers.

 

I checked with Sid to see whether it was okay to use his alter ego as the music agent and he agreed. In some ways the story becomes more about him than us but that's okay too.

It goes like this.

 

 The Last Great Campbell Brothers' Squirt Gun Caper

The second idea for a label this year was actually a series of labels for this wine wrapped around another stupid episode of the Campbell Brothers. Another credit has to go to my friend Sid who contributed the 'Revenge Served Cold' photo that he had taken of Ralph and I from a few years ago in Unionville Ontario.

 

Again that lovely building in Goodwood, Ontario is featured. Also featured is the old police van parked at the back of the mini golf course at the Big Apple in Colborne, Ontario (not New York). You can't make this stuff up, really.

 

 

Here are the labels.

 

Squirt Gun Caper, Caught, Revenge Served Cold

 And the story, prepared as a pamphlet, went something like this...

 

 

 

 

And that, as they say, is it.

 

Hope you get a chuckle out of the offering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas Wines 2022: Delusions of Grandeur and Brotherlands

 Christmas Wines of 2022

 

This has been another rough year for most of us. Another year of virus, of war, of incompetent politicians, rising inflation and a whole ten yards more.

 Ralph decided to make a red wine for this years offering and I volunteered to contribute toward a white wine. We had fun coming up with the ideas for episodes concerning those bumbling Campbell brothers. We hope you enjoy too...

Delusions of Grandeur

Ralph came up with the name first, he wanted his wine to be titled 'Delusions of Grandeur'. Okay by me.

The elements for the picture were drawn (or pic-ted really) from a couple of sources. The background was a picture I had taken years before of the throne room of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland with a few embellishments. The 'Game of Thrones' throne was taken at a place previously mentioned in the blog, Primitive Designs, located near Port Hope, Ontario.

On the handout, or pamphlet, I used another shot from Scotland, from the Castle Campbell near Dollar. I lined up a couple of outhouses with silhouettes of courtly figures, added a 'garderobes are us' sign, and Bob's your uncle.

The label, once completed, looked like this...

Hail to the king, Delusions of Grandeur

And the story goes something like this...

For the white wine I took inspiration from the video game I've been playing (for years), Borderlands. I thought it would be a nice twist of reality to have... well, you'll see. 

 

I took some game shots, some of me and my brother (I'm still amazed at how versatile my living room is for photos in spite of all the clutter in there). I also used a background from a misty field located near my brother's place, and, oh yes, a picture of a metal rhino taken from you know where.

Brotherlands

Instead of a single label I produced a set of three:

 

Their story is linked in the pamphlet.

And there you have it, this year's installments of the not so epic Campbell brothers' sagas.

Christmas wine 2021

 Ah, here we go again. It has been a difficult year for all of us. Top of the list of contributing factors is the virus (which will remain un-named) and whatever variant (also un-named) of same we're into now.

My Brother Ralph and I continued with our running gag of 25 years or so. I checked on the first iteration, we've been doing this since 1995 in fact. We always made wine with intent: to share a beverage with friends and family (not to poison as some may claim), and then share a bit of a joke (much needed in these fearful times) pointing fun at ourselves.

Ralph did a great job making the wine this year. He decided to concentrate on a red wine which, he has said, is quite good, almost fit to drink. 

I worked on the labels and the story.

So this is the continuing saga of...

Campbell Wine Wine

Below is the label for this years wine. The main feature, the front barrel, was actually contributed by my son Elliot. He took the photograph while he was at one of our favourite places, Primitive Designs, and then sent it to me with permission to use the image.

I cut the barrel out and added it to a photograph of my own and threw in some finishing touches: modifying the gun powder to read gnu powder, the red Wine, the X, the wooden sign, and there you have it. 

Once complete I started working on a bit of a story and then copied it to a brochure template, adding the pictures and then printed that out as our handout for the year. Here it is.

The reverse page looked like this...

And that's about it. We hope you get a smile or two out of our efforts.

`Christmas Wine 2020

 Expletive Deleted

Well, it certainly seems like years since I stared at a blank blog page. So this is what one looks like.

For some reason putting together this little posting seems even more daunting than usual, it's more difficult to compose my thoughts in order to do homage to this year's wine. 

Yes, I said homage. 

As we're all aware much has changed in this past year. The world may look the same but it is radically different and on many levels. I'll just leave that at that. 

And now....back to our regularly scheduled programme.

For the 2020 wine Ralph wanted to use 'KISS' as the watchword, and he and I did just that. I'm pretty sure you understand what that means. The second 'S', if you can't guess, stands for stupid. That seems to be another watchword with us.

Ralph decided to concentrate on doing just a single batch of wine this year, the red. I'm guessing he wanted to see if it became stable enough to bottle, or even stay in the same room with. 

(This did not go without notice, the white wine crowd put up quite the fuss.)

I must say he did exemplary work. He didn't even blow up the carboy when he added oak to the fermenting mixture. I almost have the nerve up to pop a cork and sample the wine. Almost but not quite.

Of course keeping it simple creates other issues. Ralph found that because of this whole damn virus thing he couldn't use the clogging group that he hung around with to mash the grapes like he was used to doing. He had to go back to the old tried and true method and mash them with the car. It's really hard on the tires.

My part in keeping it simple was to refuse to buy the colour cartridges for the printer. If Black & White was good enough for a blended scotch it was good enough for me.

We're not cheap, we're Scotts.

When it finally came time for me to play my role as chief putting things on paper guy Ralph came over to spend the weekend (he's in my bubble). I asked Ralph what he'd like to see as a label. We hashed ideas around and eventually came up with 'Expletive Deleted'. That phrase kind of says it all.

Expletive Deleted, the wine

Once the labels were created, argued over, torn up, redid, torn up again and finally printed out for good, we sat side by each as I typed on the computer and worked on a little story, or commentary really. Okay, maybe a bit of a warning. Both of us came up with suggestions as the words flowed onto the paper. It didn't take long. We both think it was funny. We still do.

When I gave out some of the wine I wanted to include the 'warning' and so I took the 'story' page and wrapped it over the neck of the bottle. Something like you see here. 

A fine wrapping job

And what did it say?

The note

It's probably a bit awkward to read like that so, never fear, I'll print the text out separately here.

Hmmm...It doesn't appear that Blogger allows me to use the same font as what was used for the handout. That's okay, I can work with that. 

The original idea, of course, was wanting something that looked like a hand printed note. This was what we came up with.

Hey, Campbell brothers…

What’s up with you guys?

Every year it’s the same damn thing, you give us this stuff you call  ‘expletive deleted’ wine. Well it Ain’t.

We don’t dare drink it. We tried that once and lost consciousness. The dog did and he died. The cat tried it too, and lost all his fur. All the other cats laugh at him. Tried to use it as a spot remover on the floor and it did that okay, but also burnt a hole through to the basement. I had to replace the damn water heater. Why pick on us? What did we ever do to you? My son Ronny suggested we use it as fuel for the truck. It ran the engine so hot that it seized. Have you ever seen melted valve covers under a vehicle before? And now you have the nerve to ask for a testimonial. And fumes? Don’t even go near there. It smells so bad that skunks pack up and leave. And the purple cloud bleached my wife Ethel’s hair, and then it fell out too. You thought she was difficult to live with before…

The sooner we never see you again the better it’ll be when we next meet. And I suggest you stuff the ‘expletive deleted’ wine. You know where.

So that's the story of this year's wine. I hope you enjoy.

Be safe.

Christmas Wines of 2019

I have been terribly remiss in posting the wine labels for this year. One reason for this, or part of a reason, is that my brother's wife Linda passed away in November. That sort of put a wrench in the works for a lot of things.

One of the strange things or timely things about this years' efforts was that I was actually trying to be ahead of the game and had already done most of the artwork on two labels, one for the red wine and the other for the white wine to be. Then Linda passed on.

Talking with my brother later on it was decided to dedicate the white wine label to Linda.

So with great respect and love this is the label for her.

I hope she can rest now in peace.

And now WhutsmattaU.

Whutsamatta U varsity letters

If you have read any of the other blog entries for the Campbell Brothers Winery you will know that we always make up a stupid story about the bumbling brothers and their failed schemes. We make copies of the story and they accompany the wine that we give away to friends and family as Christmas gifts. Some of the friends have even remained friends afterward.

For this year Ralph wanted to do something with a tag line from an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. This was Whutsamatta U (I think it was spelled slightly differently for the cartoon). It became the inspiration for another tale on how the Campbell brothers screw up.

We talked over some ideas and then I put together a mock university newsletter with the story, Ralph liked it, we kept it. It went to press.

The front page of the newsletter looked like this:

The back looked like this:

For the actual wine labels I did an image search on 'bottles' and found online almost identical catalog images for both a red and a white wine. I think they were wine bottle holders or something similar. Although the images were 'borrowed' from the internet for our use it was not for any malicious purpose, everything was just for fun. There certainly was no profit for us in any of this.

So this is how the red label turned out.

Red Menace

Red Menace, the wine.

As I mentioned I had already made up a white wine label similar to the red. I'll post it here but this edition of the label for this year was not given out. Oh well. I really liked the fact that it was almost identical to the red, but white. In other words, the same but different. Much like the Campbell brothers themselves.

Here is what I mean.

Yellow Peril

Yellow Peril, the wine

I liked the idea of using past slogans from former political propaganda with an updated view or context.

So that's the lot, I hope that you like.

Christmas wines of 2018

Here we are again at the tail end of another year. It's time for the Campbell brothers to emerge from their long summer slumber and finally do some work on something important. Wine was produced and bottled, labels created and attached, brochures written and printed, and here you are to view the result.

We settled on the theme of 'keep it stupid, simple' for this year and so, without much more forethought, we present the labels.

Wine-Me-Up

What ended up as the label for the white wine actually started out as a visit to a country store just north of Port Perry, ON. On the front lawn of the store, more like a field really, was an old Coke wagon and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a few pictures before going inside and buying some stuff.

Ralph and I both took turns on the seat and also pretending we were pulling the buggy while the other one took the pictures.

Coke wagon separated from background

This is one of the close up shots of the buggy that was used for the red wine label.

The reins and harness were taken from pictures on the internet. If you look at them they really don't make much sense at all. To make them sort of fit the reins had to be twisted through a non-existant dimension.

Oh, I do believe I mentioned that the buggy was in a field, the gravel road was inserted later as well.

Ralph Campbell, 'reins' of the outfit.

The picture of Ralph was cut and pasted onto the buckboard from another one of the shots we took. We did it because this photograph was the best shot of me pulling the wagon.

See what we have to go through.

And then there was red.

Campbell Shack Wine

The wagon you know where it came from. Us on the couch was shot in my living room. The rest of the image was sourced through the net. Even the couch we are shown here sitting on came from there. I think the 'Secret Hideout' sign came from a video game, which one I'm not too sure. The background was actually the shot of the shack. The picture was lightened to more easily see.


And as has been our want a brochure was produced for a bonus handout to sort of tie in a storyline of the brothers.


Here is what the front of that looked like.

Ralph Campbell, 'reins' of the outfit.

 The left side of the front page looked like:

In the middle of the fold was the following:

The inside of the brochure looked like this.

First the left and centre panels:

And the centre right looked this way:

And that's all folks. Thank you.

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.