Help Small Wineries Create Lovable Labels with Your Vote (and Win Free Wine)

Here at The Reverse Wine Snob we love small wineries, but we also realize the challenges facing them. In a world where marketing matters more than ever, it’s exceedingly difficult for wineries with limited marketing budgets to stand out. Today we’re happy to reveal that a new start-up called Drink Crate is here to help these wineries by crowd-sourcing great names and labels for their wines. We think this is a great idea and we’re happy to introduce it to you and urge you to support it — whether that be through entering your own design, funding their Kickstarter project, buying their wine once it is produced or just voting on the labels you like best. Read on for a special message from Drink Crate on how you can be involved. (And we’ll be back with the rest of our box wine series tomorrow!)

Small wineries have a tough time establishing themselves in a crowded industry. We created Drink Crate to help them out by making lovable wine brands for small wineries. Here’s how it works.

First we start with a type of wine — in November we’ve selected “red wine blend” as the wine brand to create.

Second, people like you submit potential names for wine brands or label designs — fun and imaginative designs are encouraged! Next, more people like you rate the label designs and vote for their favorites — everyone who votes will be entered into a drawing for a free case of wine.

When all the votes are in, Drink Crate will choose a highly-voted label design for our own red wine blend (a delicious Syrah-based blend from central California) and pay the winning designer $1,000. All the other label designs are placed in the Brand Marketplace next to voting data so that small wineries can adopt a brand that fits their values and was popular in the contest (we ask that the winery pay the designer, of course!).

Here is a small sample of designs — see and vote for all of them at DrinkCrate.com.

And to help us get this off the ground for the first time, we’re running a Kickstarter campaign at the same time. If you think Drink Crate is a good idea, or just want great rewards like one of the T-shirts below or a personal wine lesson from a Certified Sommelier over Skype, please visit our Kickstarter page.