Beautiful bottles (with wonderful wine inside)

When Laura Riches started the wine-in-a-box company Laylo, making the boxes look ‘beautiful – something that could sit proudly on a kitchen worktop’ was a key part of the plan. Each variety has its own bespoke livery. ‘We spend hours chatting to the winemakers. We research local craftsmanship, from fabrics and wallpapers to artwork… The design emerges from the bits that capture our imagination.’ I particularly love the toilede-jouy-style wrapping of the French sauvignon blanc, whose pattern takes in scenes from the winemaker’s life.

It’s not just Laylo that’s at it. Increasing numbers of wines, in bottles and cans as well as boxes, are being packaged to look as good on the table as they taste in the glass. This marks a shift from a time when people might have been very judgy about the wine behind labels with pattern and colour. And, to be fair, for a while those assumptions were likely to have been right. Château Mouton Rothschild – which pioneered collectible art labels, with designs by major fine artists – has always been a glorious exception to the rule that, for a long time, anything showy often meant the liquid inside was the wine equivalent of a chicken nugget. Now the opposite often applies: smallrun bottlings of more artisan wines are very likely to have a striking label.

Look at the wines sold by The Sourcing Table – so beautiful you could be forgiven for imagining they’d been chosen for that reason alone. Or the experimental Don’t Feed the Ponies range made by Sharpham at Sandridge Barton in Devon, which encompasses, inter alia, a very pale red made from a blend of four ‘pinot’ grapes; an orange wine; and a cloudy sparkling ‘col fondo’ style (like the proseccos of the same name, it’s fermented first in tank and then in bottle). Each of the Don’t Feed the Ponies wines is named after a tor on Dartmoor, and brings craftsmanship to the fore with an eye-catching label designed by a local artist.

A clever label can also tell a story. Brit Katie Jones, who makes gorgeous wines in the rugged Languedoc, has a wine called Along Came Jones Hairy Grenache. The label features a comicstrip with Jones as the hero, who discovers she’s growing a type of grenache that’s different to everyone else’s.

Others simply stand out. There’s a school of labels whose backgrounds are a high-saturation, single-block colour, like the lapis blue of Domaine Equis’ Equinoxe Crozes-hermitage or the strong red of the Grand Aven of

Vignerons Ardéchois (both of these wines are sold by yapp.co.uk).

None of this is to say that supermarkets and discount chains are slacking. Two of the most beautiful labels among this year’s crop are on bottles of Greek wine in Aldi. I love the octopus whose golden tentacles wind around the assyrtiko-syrah rosé.

Speaking of rosé, in this aisle it’s not just the label that is highly stylised. There are square bottles, round bottles, bottles that are squat and bottles that are tall with voluptuous curves; bottles whose glass forms pleat-like ridges to refract sunlight in glittering patterns, and bottles made from chunky glass with the palest hint of green. Some, like Whispering Angel spin-offs The Beach and The Pale (which features a sketch of café society), have labels that allude to the holiday feeling you might hope to have when you’re drinking them.

Once, anything showy often meant the liquid inside was the wine equivalent of a chicken nugget