How do you explain your wine’s special and unique taste to a shopper who’s never tried it before? While you can’t always give out free samples, the design of your wine and vineyard logo can do the next best thing: explain your brand’s special and unique personality.
Your winery logo—along with how well you design the bottle label—conveys to new customers what your wine is like. Sitting on the shelf next to your competitors, your visuals need to both attract and inform, reflecting your brand values while persuading shoppers to try it.
Below, we’ve collected ideas and inspiration for beautiful wine logos and outline the basics of how to design a great wine and vineyards logo. Read on for a wide variety of top winery and wine logos to inspire you.
How to turn good wine and vineyard logos into great ones
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If you’re coming into logo design without any experience, it can be intimidating. Here we’ll give you a crash course in logo design; first the universal best practices and then considerations specific to wineries.
Fundamentals of logo design
Logo design is a nuanced specialization of graphic design that encompasses aesthetics, branding & marketing, composition, color theory, typography and artistic skill. We give a fuller introduction to the craft in our free online guide How to design a logo, but here we’ll summarize some key points to provide a little background.
Design for your brand. There’s not one “best type of logo”—the most successful logos are the ones that best represent their brand. The aggressive red and garish typography of the Coca Cola logo may suit the brand well, but those same design choices would hurt more relaxed brands like a yoga studio or massage parlor.
So before anything else, you have to consider what kind of brand you want to be—your “brand identity.” Are you a playful brand or a serious brand? Are you a fun party wine or a more sophisticated dinner wine? That will guide your design choices, in particular colors, shapes and letters.
Colors, shapes and letters. Each different color and shape represents different emotions—for example, logos with excessive black seem more sophisticated, logos with a lot of circles seem friendlier etc. Likewise, that extends to font choice, such a formal, elegant serifs vs. casual, modern sans-serif. Every design decision reflects on your brand, so build your brand identity from the ground up with strategic choices.
Tips exclusive to wine and vineyard logos
As part of the beverage industry, logos for wineries should follow the general guidelines of all food & drink logo design: opt for “mouth-watering” imagery, such as appetizing colors and images, like grapes, as you’ll see below.
Unlike other food and beverage products, the wine industry has an enormous history and culture to draw from, perhaps the most of all food products. As a result, wine and vineyard logos can use more vintage and traditional styles that would seem out of place for other drinks.
Again, it depends on what kind of brand you are, of course—more youthful brands benefit more from modern and future-leaning logos than century-old styles.
Most effective styles of wine and vineyard logos
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Many wineries have similar business goals, so while each logo design style should be distinct to the brand, we see a handful of the same styles dominate the industry. In particular:
- Traditional and elegant
- Vintage illustrations
- Grape-themed
- Playful
- Modern
However, it’s important to keep in mind that you can blend these styles with each other, as well as styles not listed here. For example, vintage illustrations work well with traditional logos, especially with grape themes, so don’t feel restricted to using just one or two or three styles at a time.
Take a look at the examples below and see which look matches your brand.
Traditional and elegant wine logos
Traditional logo styles, some dating back centuries, fit the wine industry’s illustrious history like a glove. For more serious and top-tier wines, a traditional logo shows off your prestige and elegance, even if your company was just recently founded.
What’s classified as “traditional” logos actually draw from a variety of influences and different time periods, but some of the more recognizable traits are:
- Baroque frames
- Leaf and other embellishments in negative space
- Serifs… serifs everywhere
- Monograms and initials
- Royal emblems (crowns, shields, etc.)
Remember, you can apply styles in different degrees. While Diego Garcia below adheres strictly to traditional, Pecos Flavor mixes a traditional circular frame with more modern elements like bright colors, even tempering the serifs a bit.
Vintage illustrations
Like traditional logos, vintage illustrations conjure up the wine industry’s long past—but unlike traditional logos, vintage illustrations have a lot more flexibility and customization. While landscape scenes are most common (especially with rolling hills and rows of crops), your illustration can be of anything you want, even gorillas or old airplanes, giving this style a high degree of personalization.
These illustrations are typically hand-drawn in the look of sketches, with line shading and meticulous attention to detail, sometimes drawing in each individual strand of hair. However, recently we’ve started seeing that same style replicateddigitally, as seen by the logo for the South Australian Farmgate Group and the logo for Crimson Lanes Wineyard below.
Grape-themedwine logos
Why bother forging a brand new wine icon from scratch when the perfect one already exists: grapes. If your goal is to make your wine seem more appetizing, there’s no better symbol than grapes. Although it may seem obvious, it’s often overlooked—the sight of grapes remind people of the natural taste of wine.
While imagery of a vineyard plays on people’s perceptions of elegance and authenticity, imagery of grapes plays on their culinary sensibilities. If your wine’s strongest selling point is its sensual taste, this might be a good style for you.
Moreover, grapes are composed of circles, an effective shape for logos. Round shapes are both visually dynamic and friendly; a skilled graphic designer can do a lot with them, whether an artistic reimaging like WineFamily or a true-to-life rendition like Rootstaert.
Playfulwine logos
For some brands, particularly those that target younger or more casual customers, the trends above might come across as too formal and they’re going for something more untraditional. Not all wines are made to win international competitions—some are marketed for parties or occasional wine-drinkers. These types of brands benefit more from playful styles—logos that surprise shoppers, make them smile, or that just seem like fun.
Playful logos use happy design choices, such as:
- Bright colors
- Mascots
- Animal imagery
- Visual puns
- Whimsical or surprising imagery
One worthwhile strategy for playful logos is to add layers. Logos like Applause and Sommbody’s Wine have a lasting effect because the viewer has to think about them, even just a little. Duality is a common technique for promoting brand awareness, but it’s ill-advised for more serious and formal brands.
Modernwine logos
Last, some wine and vineyard logos prefer to break away from wine culture altogether. These brands look ahead rather than behind and borrow logo design trends from other industries. Modern styles favor abstraction and quirky designs, with more experimental visuals.
The modern style encompasses any number of popular trends—any cues that shoppers recognize as contemporary. That includes understated minimalism or big, bold and textured letters like Nomad Outdoor Wines, interesting juxtapositions like Fallon Place Winery and fine art techniques like Famiglia Mazzarrini.
How to get the best wine and vineyard logos
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As we explained in a previous guide on Comparing the best ways to get a logo designed, a company has four main options for getting a logo. Let’s briefly review them now:
- Logo maker (DIY). With the help of a logo maker or other entry-level design software, you essentially make your logo yourself from scratch.
- Hire a design agency. You hand off all logo design duties to a design agency and their suite of specialists, but the extra talent comes at an extra cost.
- Work with a freelancer. You can find a freelance designer to design your logo for you. This gives you the benefit of a professional at less cost than an agency.
- Commission a design contest. In a design contest, you explain what you want in a briefing, including visual preferences and business goals. Multiple designers from all over the world then submit samples based on your briefing. From there, you simply pick the one you like best and start revisions. You only pay for the one sample you choose.
For starters, DIY and logo makers are only advisable under extreme circ*mstances, like if you have next to nothing in your budget. Your logo is an asset too important to skimp on, and considering how complicated logo design is, if it’s not designed by a professional it may not be as effective as it could be.
From there, it’s a decision of both cost and preference. If your only concern is price, check out our Logo design cost guide for more detailed distinctions.
For quick reference, freelance logo design work could be anywhere from $250 to $2,500, depending on the skill of the designer. Even at its most expensive though, it’s still cheaper than design agencies, on average. Agencies have a larger workforce, so you have more specialists working for you, but you’re paying for them whether you need them or not. It’s easier to justify design agency costs for large scale projects like an entire brand identity rather than a single logo.
Right in the middle of those two options is thelogo design contest. They typically cost anywhere from $300 to $1,000, depending on what level of designer you choose.
The strongest advantage of design contests—and the reason they’re so popular—is that it leverages the creativity of multiple designers, who come up with different ideas of logos designs you can choose from. If you’re still unsure what style and look is right for you, a contest has the benefit of experimentation—you may not know what logo design best suits you until you see some creative drafts from several designers.
If you already know what style and look you’re going for, your best bet is going to be working directly with a freelancer. You can browse portfolios to find the perfect match in terms of style and then work with the freelancer to get exactly what you’re looking for.
Want some expert help?
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Your logo is the face of your brand, so it’s not something you should take lightly. When designed well, your logo can be one of your most powerful marketing tools. If you like the security and convenience of a design contest, you can get started on your logo briefing here.
If you prefer a more hands-on approach and want to work directly with a freelance designer of your choice, use our free designer search tool. You can search our community of designers from all across the world, with filters like style, industry, skill level, or languages. Start searching for freelance designers now.
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