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.

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.

Christmas wines of 2015, The Walking Dread and Winecraft.

This year we tried to keep it simple (in other words we didn't go too nuts on the stories). We did add a bit of an extra bonus too, an unwanted poster, to go along with the rest of the handouts. The photo credit for the photograph of me and my brother goes to my son Elliot.

The Walking Dread

For the label for the white wine I got a picture from Ralph which had been taken by his wife Linda while he was doing some insulation work in his house. I liked it so much that I thought it should be a label onto itself, no need for me cluttering up the frame. We came up with a storyline and the rest is, ah,  kinda' warped history.

And this is what we came up with for the story.

Winecraft

For the red wine we came up with the idea of us being in a video game. Both Ralph and I have been playing the game Borderlands and I liberally borrowed from some screen captures I took during gameplay. I wanted to make it look as if we were a bit more cartoonish so I did work on a couple of recent photographs to wash out some of the detail and emphasize the colour.

And the story goes something like this...