Reeling in Wine Consumers
When it comes to foil decoration, wine drinkers take the bait.
September 2006 by Jean-Marie Hershey
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Candlelight, Chateaubriand for two, gypsy violins, a bottle of your favorite wine on ice. The sommelier presents the bottle for your inspection. Very nice; very nice indeed. But wait, look at that label! What exquisite detail. Those colors, that texture! Honey, look!
The recipe for a perfect evening? Doubtful, but there’s no denying the power of a perfectly crafted wine label to lift an ordinary experience to the realm of the sublime.
“We built our business on the mythology behind people buying wine based on the label,” says Doug Sage, wine market manager for Tapp Technologies. He adds that studies have shown that between 60 percent and 70 percent of wine purchases are driven by the label. With numbers like that, it’s a small wonder wineries place such emphasis on crafting labels with irresistible visual, tactile, and performance characteristics.
With facilities in Vancouver, B.C., Portland, Ore. and Napa, Calif., Tapp is one of the world’s premier printers of roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels, offering customized label solutions with its combination of waterless offset, flexographic, and digital offset technologies. The company has garnered multiple national and international awards at an impressive rate over the past decade, including the World’s Greatest Label printer distinction 10 years in a row. It is also a technological innovator, having pioneered the use of waterless offset technology in the label industry. Tapp currently operates seven Sanjo waterless UV offset presses, five Mark Andy water-based UV flexo presses, and a Gallus RCS 330 10-station combination flexo press, its newest addition to the flexo platform it has been building for the past three years. A pair of HP-Indigo ws4000 presses serves as Tapps’ digital platform.
Impressed by pressure-sensitive
“We print only pressure-sensitive labels,” Sage confirms. “The shift away from sheetfed glue-applied to pressure-sensitive has been occurring industry wide over the past ten years. In 1993, we saw the need to transition from glue-applied to roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels. The unit cost is higher but the application is easier, and more elaborate diecuts are possible.”
Whereas sheetfed labels can wind up “dirty,” and register can be a problem, he says, pressure-sensitive technology results in a cleaner, register-correct label. Given shrinking brand cycles (from 5 years to 16 months, Sage says), production efficiency is a key focus for Tapp.
“What you tend to see in the wine market is that with huge brands where there isn’t a lot of changeover, the labels tend to be glue-applied. As you cross the spectrum to a certain grade point, however, labels tend to be pressure-sensitive for the following reasons: they’re cleaner, easier to apply, and they permit more design flexibility as well as more efficiency on the applicator. You can drill down on any of these and say that the die shapes are more intricate. You can apply multi-piece labels more easily. You have two- or three-piece front labels that are easily applied on pressure-sensitive applications, more difficult on sheetfed.”
The recipe for a perfect evening? Doubtful, but there’s no denying the power of a perfectly crafted wine label to lift an ordinary experience to the realm of the sublime.
“We built our business on the mythology behind people buying wine based on the label,” says Doug Sage, wine market manager for Tapp Technologies. He adds that studies have shown that between 60 percent and 70 percent of wine purchases are driven by the label. With numbers like that, it’s a small wonder wineries place such emphasis on crafting labels with irresistible visual, tactile, and performance characteristics.
With facilities in Vancouver, B.C., Portland, Ore. and Napa, Calif., Tapp is one of the world’s premier printers of roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels, offering customized label solutions with its combination of waterless offset, flexographic, and digital offset technologies. The company has garnered multiple national and international awards at an impressive rate over the past decade, including the World’s Greatest Label printer distinction 10 years in a row. It is also a technological innovator, having pioneered the use of waterless offset technology in the label industry. Tapp currently operates seven Sanjo waterless UV offset presses, five Mark Andy water-based UV flexo presses, and a Gallus RCS 330 10-station combination flexo press, its newest addition to the flexo platform it has been building for the past three years. A pair of HP-Indigo ws4000 presses serves as Tapps’ digital platform.
Impressed by pressure-sensitive
“We print only pressure-sensitive labels,” Sage confirms. “The shift away from sheetfed glue-applied to pressure-sensitive has been occurring industry wide over the past ten years. In 1993, we saw the need to transition from glue-applied to roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels. The unit cost is higher but the application is easier, and more elaborate diecuts are possible.”
Whereas sheetfed labels can wind up “dirty,” and register can be a problem, he says, pressure-sensitive technology results in a cleaner, register-correct label. Given shrinking brand cycles (from 5 years to 16 months, Sage says), production efficiency is a key focus for Tapp.
“What you tend to see in the wine market is that with huge brands where there isn’t a lot of changeover, the labels tend to be glue-applied. As you cross the spectrum to a certain grade point, however, labels tend to be pressure-sensitive for the following reasons: they’re cleaner, easier to apply, and they permit more design flexibility as well as more efficiency on the applicator. You can drill down on any of these and say that the die shapes are more intricate. You can apply multi-piece labels more easily. You have two- or three-piece front labels that are easily applied on pressure-sensitive applications, more difficult on sheetfed.”
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