Reeling in Wine Consumers

Candlelight, Chateaubriand for two, gypsy violins, a bottle of your favorite wine on ice. The sommelier presents the bottle for your inspection. Very nice; very nice indeed. But wait, look at that label! What exquisite detail. Those colors, that texture! Honey, look!

The recipe for a perfect evening? Doubtful, but there’s no denying the power of a perfectly crafted wine label to lift an ordinary experience to the realm of the sublime.

“We built our business on the mythology behind people buying wine based on the label,” says Doug Sage, wine market manager for Tapp Technologies. He adds that studies have shown that between 60 percent and 70 percent of wine purchases are driven by the label. With numbers like that, it’s a small wonder wineries place such emphasis on crafting labels with irresistible visual, tactile, and performance characteristics.

With facilities in Vancouver, B.C., Portland, Ore. and Napa, Calif., Tapp is one of the world’s premier printers of roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels, offering customized label solutions with its combination of waterless offset, flexographic, and digital offset technologies. The company has garnered multiple national and international awards at an impressive rate over the past decade, including the World’s Greatest Label printer distinction 10 years in a row. It is also a technological innovator, having pioneered the use of waterless offset technology in the label industry. Tapp currently operates seven Sanjo waterless UV offset presses, five Mark Andy water-based UV flexo presses, and a Gallus RCS 330 10-station combination flexo press, its newest addition to the flexo platform it has been building for the past three years. A pair of HP-Indigo ws4000 presses serves as Tapps’ digital platform.

Impressed by pressure-sensitive

“We print only pressure-sensitive labels,” Sage confirms. “The shift away from sheetfed glue-applied to pressure-sensitive has been occurring industry wide over the past ten years. In 1993, we saw the need to transition from glue-applied to roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels. The unit cost is higher but the application is easier, and more elaborate diecuts are possible.”

Whereas sheetfed labels can wind up “dirty,” and register can be a problem, he says, pressure-sensitive technology results in a cleaner, register-correct label. Given shrinking brand cycles (from 5 years to 16 months, Sage says), production efficiency is a key focus for Tapp.

“What you tend to see in the wine market is that with huge brands where there isn’t a lot of changeover, the labels tend to be glue-applied. As you cross the spectrum to a certain grade point, however, labels tend to be pressure-sensitive for the following reasons: they’re cleaner, easier to apply, and they permit more design flexibility as well as more efficiency on the applicator. You can drill down on any of these and say that the die shapes are more intricate. You can apply multi-piece labels more easily. You have two- or three-piece front labels that are easily applied on pressure-sensitive applications, more difficult on sheetfed.”

A house built on water(-less offset)

“Offset is our ‘mother ship,’” Sage confirms. “High-quality, 300-linescreen capability is the foundation of our business. It’s the kind of quality wineries were looking for when transitioning from sheetfed glue-applied to roll-fed pressure-sensitive labels.” Broadly speaking, he explains, Tapp’s three printing platforms have some overlap, but are loosely targeted to certain segments of the industry, with offset in the “sweet spot” for mid-run, high-quality, 300-linescreen work; flexo for lower-cost, longer-run, lower value-added labels; and digital for the short runs required by small boutique wineries. The distinction between offset and flexo may be blurring as flexo quality improves, Sage admits. “It’s been our observation over the past five years that flexo is coming up and that the perceived benefit of offset versus flexo is shrinking. Our new Gallus can do 200 linescreen.”

Offset printing lends itself best to high-resolution, high-quality printing on the “toothy-looking,” uncoated papers favored by North American wineries, Sage says. “We print the majority of our labels on uncoated estate stock,” he says. “Our Sanjos can print on all kinds of substrates. We print more shiny coated stocks with flexo,” he adds, citing Australian and Chilean wines as those that have “evolved” toward a coated facestock for their labels.

While Tapp strives to preserve the uncoated look prized by its customers, the company works continually to develop new coatings with protective properties for which there is growing market demand. Chief among these are scuff and water resistance, according to Sage.

“Imagine the challenge in trying to maintain the uncoated look and still be water-resistant. It’s water after all. When you immerse it in an ice bucket, paper will absorb water,” he says. Tapp Technologies has developed certain proprietary processes to counter these concerns, Sage says, but “our technical guy won’t even tell me the formulations.”

Blow hot, blow cold

Tapp also performs foil stamping, frequently in combination with embossing for a foil and embossed look. In fact, Sage explains, “We often use combination dies that foil and emboss at the same time. This method can be less expensive for very intricate designs because you combine two stations into one so that you can avoid a two-pass. There’s a little more complexity to it, but you have fewer issues with registration if you’re doing a foil [rather than] an emboss. Some foils work, some don’t. It depends on the characteristics of the substrate and the foil itself. There’s a little witchcraft to it.”

The company performs both rotary and flat hot stamping but avoids cold stamping, at least until the quality improves. “Our perception and that of our customers is that the quality isn’t there yet with cold stamping. It may not be the reality, but that’s the perception. Hot stamping also suits our need for definition and our use of textured foils. Flat and rotary hot stamping can be done in-line, although rotary has the potential to be faster,” says Sage.

Foils are flat hot-stamped on Tapp’s Sanjo platform. Its Gallus and Mark Andy presses feature rotary hot-stamp capability. “You can achieve greater definition with flat stamping than with rotary stamping,” Sage explains. “We also have more success with textured foils when we flat stamp them. On some flexo applications, we do our foil stamping off-line. On the digital side, all finishing is done off-line.”

Front labels tend to be more decorative than back labels, having up to three foils and two embosses. (Sage explains that back label copy is commonly referred to as the “romance story,” since it can range from witty or humorous to overblown and pretentious to flowery to clinical.) Whatever the design and editorial choices, however, “we do everything in-line where possible,” Sage says. “We can do up to three foils and two embosses in-line.”

A sticky proposition

That’s all good, but what if it doesn’t stick? Adhesives are key, Sage admits, citing high heat and humidity, intense cold, and water vapor as factors that can undermine the application of even the most gorgeously crafted label.

“We’re also smashing the heck out of these labels with foil stamping and embossing,” a process that can “deaden” the adhesive. “Combine a foil border with a dead adhesive and you get ‘flagging,’ where the edge of the label peels off,” he says. On top of this, Tapp faces an additional challenge from customers that want it both ways, a label that will stick, but be removable.

“Sometimes they want the label to exhibit ‘dwell time,’” Sage says. “They don’t want the label to be immediately tacky in case they want to reposition or remove it if something is wrong. These are all competing tensions because the more you want the adhesive to work to combat these foil bordering and flagging issues, for example, the higher tack it needs to have.”

Wash away property or removability is another demand in the market. This means that if you immerse the bottle in hot water the adhesive should release the label. This would be done if you need to do rework or if there’s been a mistake on the applicator line. After all, “Nobody wants to immerse their wine in a caustic solution to remove the label.”

Know your audience

In many ways, the wine market is driven by global supply, as well as by demographic profiles. As they become wine drinkers, for example, the so-called Millennial Generation (ages 19-30) are rejecting the snobbery, snootiness, and Old World conventions associated with wine, instead demanding something more interesting, approachable, and fun.

This is driving a whole new look at branding and packaging in the wine business that Sage describes broadly as “taking the stuffing out of the shirt.” It all started, he says, with “Australia’s Yellow Tail brand, which spawned the movement we call Critter Brands–labels that make you feel good, imprinted with the brand names of ‘user-friendly’ brands like Blue Dog, Black Cat, Rock Rabbit, Red Truck, and Smoking Loon, among countless others that are designed to be approachable, familiar, and non-intimidating to marginal wine consumers.”

Segmentation is also on the rise, with the proliferation of regional and socio-economic brands developed to appeal to specific consumer segments. Such “cult” brands, Sage says, are the result of wineries diving deep to carve out particular niches and are responsible, in part, for the proliferation of alternative packaging options. Such options include “portable” wine, smaller serving sizes, less costly PET bottles, and even single-serving canned and Tekra-boxed wines.

Put a cork–or something–in it

Sage also references the growing movement to replace corks with lower-cost screw caps, which reportedly are less prone to bacterial contamination from the cork, said to result in the spoilage of up to five percent of all wines. Alternative closures also include “corks” made from synthetic materials and “glass-on-glass” stoppers, such as Alcoa’s Vino-Seal.

As for Tapp Technologies, “Our innovation is to strike a balance between driving technology and responding to changes in consumer demand. You want to be ahead of the curve, but not the company that drives technology for its own sake into a market that doesn’t demand it.” pP