Labelling the Bottles

The latest brew - a Youngs BrewBuddy Chardonnay kit - seems to have turned out well. It's still a bit young, and the flavours should mature over the coming months, but it seems to be rather good in an early tasting. (Well, there was a half-bottle left at the end of syphoning off ... it would be silly not to drink it!)

I'd been idly thinking about labelling the bottles. It's really only going to be immediate family and friends drinking it, but as I'm already thinking about another brew there'll be a need to tell which is which.

Having done a little research on the internet, there is a great range of labels available commercially. These range from simple, rectangular labels with either a simple border or just blank - to customisable, bespoke designs which look fairly professional. At the cheaper end, these still end up costing 40p or so each - which significantly adds to the cost of each bottle.

I decided to continue the home brew thinking and see what could be achieved myself. Another search online shows up many document templates which can be downloaded and printed out at home. These vary in quality, but can of course be adapted to your give the desired effect. I didn't want anything fancy - and many of the examples I found looked rather amateurish - so I had a go at creating my own.

Having done an image search for wine labels, I arrived at a basic design on a scrap of paper. I created a logo, using the family crest and a spidery font. The name of the wine is in a scripty font, and a plain font for the details of what went into the brew. Add a couple of horizontal lines and that's good enough for what I want. Recreating this in a wordprocessor took a bit of trial-and-error, but I'm quite happy with the result. Printed 8-up on A4 marbled paper they look pretty much exactly how I wanted.