And now, a few words from your Syrah

As they’re being bottled, most wines -- the slightest nuances aside -- look pretty much the same.

But slap a label on that bottle and, suddenly, there’s so much information, both explicit and subliminal, that it’s almost impossible to take it all in.

In addition to the raw data -- the vintage and all that -- the label tells you who the winemakers are, who they think you are and the sort of wine they believe they’re producing. As wine brands proliferate, the art of label design has become an intense exercise in psycho-marketing, requiring teams of skilled people to determine the message and make it leap from the shelf.

Does the buyer see himself as a connoisseur who knows his Echezeaux from his Eiswein? A bold spirit who refuses to bow to tradition? A hipster who thinks a wine with a cool-looking minimalist label is just the thing to bring to a dinner party?

There are wine labels specifically vying for each one’s attention. And when you consider that about 80% of wine is bought directly off the shelf, it begins to become clear: That little sticky-back piece of paper has a lot of power.

Follow the kangaroo

Nowhere is wine label design more crucial to sales than with the less expensive brands aimed at occasional wine drinkers and inexperienced young consumers who want something festive-looking to take to a party.

For the current trend in splashy, colorful label design for lower-end wines, we mostly can thank the wildly successful Australian brand Yellow Tail, whose whimsical leaping kangaroo has makers of other low-priced wines hopping in emulation.

“Now you’re getting a plethora of brands with kicky names and colorful graphics -- people fishing in the shallow end with flashy lures and baits,” says Rob Celsi, vice president of brand development for Trinchero Family Estates in St. Helena, Calif.

But how does a winery make its label stand out amid the colorful din?

Seattle designer Stephen Black faced such a challenge in redesigning the label for the Talus line of wines, which retail for about $7. The concept grew from his conversation with Talus’ winemaker. “I asked her what she does that makes Talus wines unique, and she said, ‘I don’t do anything special. I get out of the way and let the grape do its thing.’ ”

So Black came up with a painterly rendition of a single grape floating in a disembodied, Magritte sort of way over an incongruous setting. For white wines, a green grape hovers over a sandy desert; for reds, a purple grape hangs suspended above a stormy sea -- all in vivid color.

“Part of my approach was to try to create contrast,” Black says. “I wanted to pique consumers’ interest with counterpoint, contrast, something very unexpected; something innovative with traditional clues. You have to find some way of creating a unique and memorable image without looking garish or cheap.”

Black further emphasized the traditional by modifying the “a” in Talus to resemble ancient Roman lettering. The typeface, moreover, is slightly condensed, “meaning you can make it larger without it looking horsey,” he says.

Finally, he opted for a vertically elongated label, which makes the bottle look a bit taller and more slender -- features generally associated with more expensive wines. But not too tall or slender.

“This is all about perceived quality at a certain price point,” Black says. “You don’t want to over-deliver graphically; you want to make sure consumers don’t expect so much that when they try the wine they’re disappointed.”

While the battle of the bottom shelves is waged with color and drama, at the high end of the price scale designers are increasingly wed to the concept of less is more.

“Everyone is trying to achieve an image of perceived rarity,” says Napa label designer Jeffrey Caldewey. “It’s the idea that if you have to put a lot of type and gaudy graphics on your package, you’re trying a little too hard. The more restrained and elegant labels are meant for the restaurant or dining room table, as opposed to trying to leap off a shelf into your lap.”

For $40, artwork

After Napa designer Anthony Auston was hired to devise a label for Joseph Phelps Vineyards’ Ovation Chardonnay, which sells for about $40, he was asked to devise something “like a museum book, something hot, contemporary, somewhat minimal, but also timeless,” Auston says.

He and his colleagues “banged our heads on our desks trying to figure out how we were going to represent a grape leaf or a grape cluster or a vineyard this time around -- when you’ve designed hundreds of wine labels, this can be a problem. So we grabbed our cameras, a bag of chips and a six-pack and headed out to the vineyards to figure it out.”

Eventually, Auston settled on a very minimalist white label bisected by a straight black horizontal line with a squiggle in its middle.

“Nearly everyone who looks at the label takes a closer look,” he says. “Most think it’s a section of barbed wire. Actually, it’s the remnants of a grape tendril clinging to a length of trellis after the winter pruning.”

It’s an intriguing image, set off by the clean elegance of the rest of the label, which is extra-wide and sits low on the bottle. Auston chose uncoated paper stock because it gives the impression of being handmade and expensive, unlike coated stock that looks mass-produced. In a retail setting, coated stock can reflect bright overhead lights, making the label harder to read.

To balance the contemporary with the traditional, he used a classic typeface but set the letters widely apart so that white space flowed easily around them.

In recent years, improvements in printing and labeling technology have allowed designers to introduce labels in virtually any shape -- a trend that has been playing out at all price levels.

Labels and overall bottle appearance can radically affect sales, wine marketers say. An effective label, however, is not just visually clever, says Jim Lapsley, a UC Davis professor and expert on wine marketing.

“The real importance of a label is that it graphically express the brand identity,” he says. “If a winery owner can’t really describe the main points that differentiate his or her brand from others in its genre, then it is difficult for a designer to capture that brand identity in a label.”

Alluring pheasants

In 1998, Bogle Vineyards jettisoned its old label, replacing it with a smaller, more elegant label with an unusual inverted egg shape and a discreet, tasteful drawing of two pheasants. The classier label was intended to reflect a general upgrading of Bogle’s vineyard and winery practices. Since the introduction of the label, which was designed by Auston, Bogle’s sales have increased 320%, or about of 25% a year.

Bogle executives attribute a major role in the increase to the new look.

Sales “just keep growing and growing even now, despite the tight wine market,” says Chris Catterton, Bogle’s marketing vice president. “The new label was a perfect fit for us. It helped communicate we were dedicated to quality and came from a farming background. Every so often you get it exactly right.”

Many marketers estimate the life of a label to be five or six years, particularly for lower-priced wines that must compete for “shelf impact.”

Designer Susan Pate, whose elegant label for Robert Mondavi’s ultra-premium Opus One has remained unchanged for 25 years, ascribes much of the instability and outlandishness of label design to “corporate marketers staggering around for trends” instead of allowing designers to communicate a winery’s uniqueness.

“When you approach it in the latter way, unless the winemaker is schizophrenic and wants to change everything, the label that results tends to be a classical statement,” she says. “If it has the right energy to begin with, it will have that energy five years or 20 years from now.”

In the fluid, individualistic and ultracompetitive wine business, one fact about label design is abundantly clear: No trend will be long-lived or apply across the board. As soon as the herd seems to be moving in a certain direction, someone quickly defies the trend in hopes of setting apart his wines. And if his defiance is, in turn, perceived to be starting a trend, someone else instantly rises to defy it.

“I can guarantee you,” says designer Rick Tharp of Los Gatos, “if everybody’s producing expensive wines with tiny little labels, somebody’s going to come to me and say, ‘Rick, I want the biggest label you can design.’ ”