Fallen Grape

Fallen Grape is a natural wine company from Santa Ynez, on California's Central Coast. Founder Paul Longo partnered with Fidencio, a third-generation winemaker, to make low-intervention wine from organically farmed grapes. We built the brand, the labels, and the world around them, most of it by hand.

Wine labels have looked the same for centuries: crests, script, a château drawn in pen and ink. Natural wine broke that open with color and attitude, and by the time Fallen Grape arrived, the shelf was full of bottles trying to be the strange one.

Paul had already made a label for his first wine, a skin contact orange called Mother. He brought it to us with one ask: make it special. On a shelf this loud, special meant something nobody could copy, so we made it by hand. Sarah Bachman, our New York based designer and illustrator, led the work.

We looked outside wine, to punk zine flyers and the way they push color and type, and explored five ways to isolate a single fallen grape. Paul pulled us toward the zine, and we narrowed to three ingredients: one main color, a character, and strong typography.

The early mockups had too much type. When we pulled the type back, the white space around it felt like habit, there because labels always have it.

So we tore it off. The label became a single sheet of orange paper with a torn edge, and that was the brand.

A torn edge still has to survive a die cutter. Sarah cut a range of shapes by hand and mocked each one on a box, until we found an edge that looked torn and could run at scale.

For the wordmark we chose Romeo, a thin and elegant serif, then reworked the letterforms by hand. Tonal foil keeps the type quiet against the orange and still legible on the shelf.

A small character from our first reference boards found a permanent home in the mark. He's called Griffin the Great. People love him.

With Paul's go-ahead, we laid out every label for production. Die cut, wound onto reams, and sent to the bottling facility.

“Mother” was the first wine. “Fifty/Fifty”, a chilled red, and then a skin contact Riesling came next, with more blends on the way.

So we designed the line as a spectrum, not a series of one-offs. Same torn edge, same blocks of natural color, with each base color matched to the juice inside the bottle. A new wine gets a new color and slots straight into the family.

Sarah and our team shot the wine with a 1970s natural feel: airy, warm, a little dreamy. Light through glass, color pooling on the table, nothing staged that didn't need to be.

As the team poured the wine around Los Angeles, two reactions kept coming back. People loved Griffin, and they loved the idea of natural beauty. So we built a world for both.

Sarah photographed Santa Ynez and reworked the images in Photoshop. Then she rebuilt the landscape as a diorama of cut construction paper and watercolor washes, the same torn paper language as the label. Creatures moved in: butterflies, a rabbit, a dragonfly, a caterpillar.

The diorama became the homepage of fallengrape.com and the backbone of the marketing. Sarah's caterpillar crawls over the watercolor cutout while a bottle glows at the center of the valley. It's an online wine store that feels like stepping into a picture book.

The system flexes into campaigns without losing itself. Skin Contact for the orange. A Night Out and By the Beach for the moments the wine is made for.

Merch carried the same handmade thread. Sarah screen-printed the vine art herself onto naturally dyed tees. Then came corduroy caps in two colors, a bucket hat, totes, stickers, and matches made with Wagner Match.

For social we built moodboards to set the direction, then let the illustrated world do the talking. The response on Instagram and TikTok has been a joy to watch.

In a sea of wine labels, Fallen Grape is the one you can pick out from across the shop. Made by hand in Santa Ynez. To be served chilled and enjoyed by all.