Tart Art

In a bid to attract younger buyers, winemakers are bringing out labels with atypical designs

- Sneha Bhura

You like your bottle of wine to be sleek, seductive and stately. One could use the same descriptors for a cat. It is surprising why our cats are not mascots of this glorious beverage considered the intellectual part of a meal. But a new brand of wine called Early Dark—from the Bengaluru-based Tetrad Global Beverages, in collaboration with Vignobles Arbeau from France—is coming out with the purr-fect label on its bottle—the face of a cat in all its colourful, geometric glory. Launched in February by Abhay Kewadkar, the managing director of Tetrad, Early Dark’s Macavity-like creature is mysteriously patterned. It looks like the elaborate face of a South Asian truck studded with lightbulbs, or an intricate trump card with neon eyes.

This label art is all about cat-titude. “After all, Early Dark is more than just wine. It is that golden sliver of time when light gives way to dark. When jackets and inhibitions vanish and our feline appetite for fun surfaces. Perfect for a brand that aims to be fun and lively rather than stuffy,” says Mohan Vijaya Raghavan, who did the artwork for the label. “We used fading typefaces to reflect the fading hues of the sky during twilight or early dark. The face or symbol of the brand—a feline—came equally naturally. Early dark is when the big cats set out to prowl and hunt.”