Imagine that you have no imagination. Imagine that you are unable to make even the simplest of decisions without pictorial guidance.

Welcome to the ‘Rethink Table Wines” packaging concept from the design agency RethinkCananda.

The labels feature illustrations of various tables.

So, we have a ping pong table, a pub garden table, a poker table, a T.V. table etc etc.

Geddit? It’s table wine.

Apparently these new wine labels provide you with suggestions on where you can drink. I have a suggestion on where these labels can be stuck.

Zombies have been a big part of my life. Firstly through the films of George Romero, then through the Resident Evil series of video games and lately through the awesome iPad game ‘Plants vs Zombies’.

I love a good intestine ripping zombie assault as much as the next man.

So, in a homage to George Romero, this wine from the Australian ‘Redheads Studio’ delivers us Return of the Living Red. The seal has blood-red wax over its cork, and the bottle is only adorned with a simple, aged envelope containing clues about the bottles contents. Within the envelope a horror story is told…. Let’s hope the wine isn’t horrific.

Another fantastic label design from the chaps at  /M/A/S/H/

It’s 3am. The phone rings. It’s the D.A’s office. A gruff voice barks “Get down to the parking lot at 59th street, Marlowe needs you”. You roll out of bed, stumble into your car and head downtown. Rain is falling. You pull up alongside the flashing blues. A wine bottle lies empty on a road, its content spilt across the road. A crime has taken place. You light a cigarette, point your camera and try to make sense of another red-stained pavement.

WineOfTheWeek brings you a clear winner of website of the week. These wines by Some Young Punks present a truly original approach to wine labels. Inspired by the pulp fiction of the 20′s through to the 50′s, each label is based on original artwork from the darker, trashier side of crime, sci-fi and erotic fiction.

The flash based website (don’t try viewing this on your new iPad or iPhone) presents a beautifully executed ‘case file’ within which the winemakers present themselves as suspects, the wines as evidence and the blame? Well the blame is for you to find out.

Wines include: Naked on Roller Skates, Passion Has Red Lips, The Squids Fist, Double Love Trouble and Monster, Monsters, ATTACK!.

It’s time to wheel out the Caption Competition again and, in the spirit of the World Cup, this one is a dead sitter just waiting to be stroked into the back of the net.

There is also a prize  this week – provided by the good people at MissionPR who, despite my non-attendance at a Cloudy Bay event on Monday, kindly kept aside a bottle of 2006 Cloudy Bay Chardonnay. Clearly I am undeserving of such a reward so the wittiest response will be sent the bottle. (Alas, applies to UK only this time out).

So here we go then. “Be Frank. I’m only drinking with you because…”

Having 3 hours to kill in an airport can be a test of any man’s endurance, however our recent ‘strike induced” delay at Turin was made easier by the amazing selection of wines in the departures shopping area.

Yes, of course there were numerous Piedmont classics – fifty different Barolo’s (I counted them) and a decent range of Barberesco, Barbera, Gavi and Asti – but our eyes were drawn to this range of seemingly novelty wines.

Turin is known worldwide for football and cars and both are represented here. The former in the guise of Juventus (‘The Old Lady’ of Italian football) and the latter in the shape of the FIAT factory. The wines are promoted under the pretty naff “Fashion Wines” label but the quality at the top end is pretty good.

The wines have been made by Italian winery Scrimaglio, located in Nizza Monferrato. The top end Juve wine is a 1998 Barbera d’Asti and prices range from €15.50 to €80.

When I was a young boy I used to be addicted to the gameshow “Catchphrase’ presented by chirpy Irishman Roy Walker. One of the rounds involved a yellow cartoon character called Mr Chips. Mr Chips would show images of objects and you’d have to guess the word that the images made up. So a picture of a car and a rear end of a cow would make “car-reer”. Or something like that.

Anyway, I wonder if Caroline Gilroy ever watched Catchphrase. Vee-Noh is her wine label concept that plays with pronunciation and uses the phonetic approach to presenting grape varieties. So we get the painfully obvious Sha-Don-Aye and Shi-Raz-Mer-Low. Hmmm.

Lame and tongue-in-cheek it may be, but I can’t help think that there is something in this. Indeed I can see phonetic labels working rather well at Yate’s Wine Lodge. For overseas readers Yate’s Wine Lodge is a kind of human zoo where cavemen and cavewomen congregate to drink Gallo by the bucket before copulating behind (sometimes in front) of trees in the local park.

Oddly enough. Many of the cavewomen are called Chardonnay.

And here’s Mr Chips in surely the funniest gameshow clip in television history!!

I imagine the thought process went something like this:

Wino 1: ‘I was in the White Burgundy section of Oddbins yesterday and I really found the wine labels puzzling”

Wino 2: ‘Yes they can be difficult to decipher. By the way, I was doing this word puzzle on the train this morning and couldn’t find the last word. Can you see it?

Wino 1: ‘Let me have a look…. wait, you’re doing a puzzle, I find wine labels puzzling… so lets design a wine label that actually IS a puzzle!’

And so Puzzle Time Wine was born to add a new dimension to our drinking experience. Below is a word search and a rebus. Enjoy.

Howwwlllllll!!!!!

I first encountered Le Beast earlier this year at the untamed frontier of You Tube. Type “wine” into the video sharing site and you are generally confronted with an endless stream of Gary Vee’s crazed thunderpants, but look closer and an even more beastly presence  will reveal itself. Unlike Gary, this beast is small, furry and has a hand stuck up his back side.

Le Beast is both a wolf like monster and an enduring enigma. History reports that “Le Bete” savagely consumed nearly one hundred young girls in the hills and vineyards of the Languedoc (South-West France) in the 1760’s. It is widely regarded as the true story that inspired Little Red Riding Hood.

Every effort to stop Le Bete failed, defying even King Louis XV who sent a crack squad to the region with murder in mind. Some say the wolf hid in the underground tunnels of an ancient Chateau near Gabian and some claim to have even seen a shadow of him in its windows. Le Bete had remained a mystery to this day. Until now.

Defying nature and reason, he has resurfaced after 250 years with a simple mission to reclaim the wine world for France.

From his own snout, a rallying cry has been issued (a warning to those with a delicate disposition, this is strong stuff):

I have taken it upon myself to lead France out of its frightful state, to take charge in a business where there is no leadership. Where we are treated as if we were drug dealers by our government, where the anti-wine lobbies are trying to take away our god given right to make and enjoy wine. Our culture is being eroded, our product is being degraded, our passion is being bled from us.

We have let them do this to us. We have been arrogant, we have been elitist, we have been snobby. We must repent and change our ways. We must demonstrate that wine is fun and there is no room for pretense. This means that my colleagues in Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy must heed the warning howl of Le Beast. Repent or face the consequences!

Le Beast has put his name to the product of the vine in order to show the world that good French wine can be made and sold at reasonable prices. We, perhaps, should choose to ignore his natural attraction to Virgin for his latest promotion – a blood lust for young innocents is not so easy shaken, even after two centuries underground.

Visit Virgin Wines to view the wine and if you want to find out more about Le Beast, you can keep a track of his adventures here and you can also follow him on twitter.

To w-w-w-wwhet your appetite:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nte5tFh8q9o&feature=player_embedded]

I can’t recall seeing better wine labels than these. The website lostateminor.com describes the labels as thus “through imaginative illustrations that reflect ‘falling from grace’, the black and white labels convey the story of how two former kings of the wine grape world — Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc — were cast aside as other varieties came into vogue.”

Developed by Mash Design for Red Heads Studio in Australia. Haven’t been able to locate them in the UK but I seem to recall that Redheads is part of Tony Laithwaites empire. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.

I recently attended a Conservative Party fundraiser. There. I’ve said it.  Just to be clear,  I will sit through a plague of Coldplay gigs before I ever vote Conservative, but when you’re under a three line whip from your mother-in-law you soon leave your political ideology hanging off the footscraper near the front door.

And besides, the event was held at John Moulton’s country residence in Kent. To the city, John Moulton may be the head of the Venture Capitalist firm Alchemy Partners but to me he’s always been the bloke in the village who has his own vineyard in the field opposite the church. Ah, now can you see where I’m going with this?

Search for John Moulton on Google and you’re sure to find some pretty damning descriptions. An article in the Independent in 2000 described him as the “unacceptable face of capitalism” and, more delightfully, “he looks… not so much as though he would sell his own granny for sixpence but that he would be happy to sell her kidneys to Ford, flog her liver to General Motors and sell the rest for scrap”. Or how about this from an unquoted source, “Some people would say that his main delight is picking the legs off flies”. Blimey.

It was in 2000 that Moulton’s restructuring plan for Rover made him the poster boy of hate for the unions. Now at the  height of financial meltdown Moulton has become the poster boy for straight talking on the economy. Spend half an hour in his company and you’ll hear his grim assessment of the spinelessness of today’s ruling political class.

You’ll also hear him proclaim a need for a “turbo charged Mrs Thatcher” to give the country a dose of shock treatment (rather than say, a Clement Atlee to restructure government for the common good) and a stark statistical overview of why we are a long way from coming out of this recession.

So, a fascinating if slightly frightening man on all matters financial, he is nonetheless full of welcoming enthusiasm and bonhomie when it comes to his burgeoning vineyard. After a tour of his garden taking in solar powered fountains, yellow raspberries and melt in the mouth early summer strawberries he walked me around the vineyard.

Planted in 2004 the grapes are mostly Pinot Noir but there is also a tiny parcel of the little known varietal Seyval, a cool climate grape grown mainly in England but also in the Finger Lakes, upper New York State.

It’s a small plot but, when it’s taken away and blended, there’s enough to produce 300 cases of what he has mockingly labelled ‘Moulton’s Recession Red – a Wine To Remember in a Year to Forget” and a smaller quantity of Shoreham Seyval.

The Moulton wines are labelled  ”UK Table Wine”, which means that at the very least they have to meet a set of requirements set down by the The Wine Standards Board of England and Wales. For the uninitiated, there are three tiers of English wine, at the very top sits the classification “Quality Wine”, then comes “Regional Wine” and finally “UK Table Wine”.

But enough of the technicalities, lets get back to that Recession red label. The full text of which reads:

In the fashionable recession colour and made from grapes grown in rural Kent Despite government regulations and taxations. Serve with whatever food you can afford.

Depending on which way you roll (or whether you still have a job) you may find this funny.

And the price? Well how about a meaty £13.50 a bottle? Yes, £13.50 for  a UK table wine. I don’t know what kind of recession John Moulton is having but clearly it’s a slightly different one to those directly effected by the restructuring and asset stripping that is the darker side of the business this colourful character represents.

Whoops, there I go again. You can take the man out of the commune but you can’t take the Marx out of the man.

And the fundraiser? Well I did buy a raffle ticket so technically I am a now a Tory campaign fund contributor. But hang on. My raffle ticket did come good and I did end up winning, you guessed it, a bottle of Recession Red. So, with an investment of £1 for the raffle ticket and a return of £13.50 for the bottle of wine I actually made a net gain of £12.50.  Which technically makes me a Tory campaign fund stealer.

Hang on, I made a profit out of other peoples labour?. Maybe I am a venture capitalist after all.