Wine Label Is Vintage Branson

Brown-Forman Corp. and British billionaire Richard Branson teamed up Monday to introduce Virgin Vines, a wine label with a strong hint of edginess.

The new label’s red and white wines began reaching store shelves nationally Monday amid a kickoff celebration in New York, including an evening party complete with women dancing on wine barrels. Its backers said the wine -- with the motto “Unscrew it, let’s do it” -- would project a hip image counter to wine’s refined reputation.

“Wine, like life, is meant to be enjoyed,” said Branson, the man behind the ubiquitous Virgin brand, who attended events to unveil the wines. “All the pomp and ceremony currently associated with wine just gets in the way of enjoying it.”

The combination of Brown-Forman’s distribution and marketing muscle and the famous Virgin brand will make the wine industry “stand up and pay attention,” said Jon Fredrikson, a wine industry consultant in the San Francisco area.

“Being associated with Richard Branson is going to be a plus,” Fredrikson said. “He’s got a pretty good track record in everything he touches.”

Virgin Vines features a white Chardonnay and a red Shiraz from the California vineyards of Brown-Forman Wines, a division of Louisville, Ky.-based liquor giant Brown-Forman. The wines sell for $9.99 a bottle, or a four-pack with smaller, plastic bottles at $8.99.

The new venture is in a hot-selling price category. Wines in the $9 to $10 price range have had double-digit sales growth nationally in the first six months of the year, Fredrikson said.

Brown-Forman Wines will market the new product, and it expects to sell several hundred thousand cases in the first year, said Don Freytag, Brown-Forman’s brand director.

“We expect this will be a leading California wine brand within three years,” he said.

The target audience is young adults sometimes turned off by wine’s image, Freytag said. The Virgin brand’s reputation for edginess and irreverence will help tap that market, he said.

“It gives us kind of an automatic entry into the consumer mind-set,” Freytag said.

The wine bottles feature painted labels and cork-free screw tops with a pull tab. On the backs of the bottles, Virgin Vines pokes fun at connoisseurs who overanalyze wine.