Maisons Marques et Domaines – new print design for the wine trade

Every January, wine importer Maisons Marques et Domaines holds a tasting of their new portfolio of wines at a central London venue. With buyers from across the UK attending, MMD hand each visitor a spiral-bound notebook covering all the exhibitors and wines.

Experiencing perhaps dozens of wines in a session, this notebook acts both as each visitor’s guide to the event and reference to the tasting.

We were approached by Maisons Marques et Domaines to create a new version of the notebook that felt both considered and professional, giving a fresh look to the piece. Having worked in this industry for many years, it’s a real pleasure to complete this piece and create some new print design for the wine trade.

A new approach to a practical piece of print

Maisons Marques et Domaines is owned by Louis Roederer and shares their brand guidelines which essentially uses Helvetica as its base alongside an elegant serif face and house colour palette. Applying this guide as our starting point, we used the lighter weights of Helvetica for most of the copy alongside a new grid to devise the central page template that runs throughout the notebook.

We quickly populated these thirty or so spreads with copy and imagery from each exhibiting trader then added in two opening spreads welcoming visitors, another innovation.

Keen to have a striking opening page and back cover, we also visited the event venue at 8 Northumberland Avenue and shot custom photography so the notebook had a set of original visuals created for this event.

The end result is a smart new take on a functional but critical piece of print.

I promise it’s not just because I have a fondness for the end product…

My team and I have been acting creating wine trade brand and retail design in different forms for as long as I can remember. It’s a lovely niche because we get to know industry personalities and (as we do for everyone) always attempt to offer a new perspective on each new job.

I suppose the best example of the breadth of work we have done has been for Oddbins who was a client for four years. This project covered so many bases including primarily customer-facing retail design across the high streets of Britain. This fantastic client had us creating in-store signage, posters, promotions and competitions, digital assets and branding.

Another client who asked us to work on both B2B and retail was Le Verre Gourmand a wine importer near Chamonix servicing ski resorts throughout the region. We designed a new brand design for LVG as well as applying the brand to vehicles, uniforms and signage. The project also led us to devise a new wine label for their in-house bottle Chemin des Pins.

As Le Verre Gourmand opened Thirsty, their first UK retail presence in the heart of Cambridge, we created the branding from scratch. The revolutionary food and wine combination retail store has gone from strength to strength. I’m pleased that it’s going to be a piece of work that continues this Spring as we brand Thirsty’s second store.

Do you commission new print design for the wine trade?

With experience going back many years, we love working with the wine trade whether with importers or high street retail.

Interested? Give us a call on 020 7351 4083 or look at the links covering key projects below.

Our work for Oddbins

Our work branding Thirsty Cambridge

Our work for Le Verre Gourmand

Our work for Chemin des Pins

See all our work for the wine trade