You watch the vines come to life in the spring and then slowly the leaves start to unfurl and tiny grapes begin to make themselves shown. You harvest, you press and ultimately you make wine. Then you watch, wait, test, test again, keep testing, adjust, taste, adjust, put in a barrel and finally!… bottle.
Through this all it never really occurs to you what it will be called. It is simply referred to by the grape variety. We had our Pinot Gris going from tank to bottle, our Pinot Noir is sitting in oak (barrel), our Chardonnay went down the drain. (Actually, that last bit, not completely true. The grapes tasted ewww ~ a technical term ~ and there were not enough to bother making a wine from, but I am storing in our cave in hopes of making into a herb vinegar.)
When our first wine was ready, our Pinot Gris Rosé, we sat around and bantered, brain stormed and generally had too much fun coming up with all sorts of ideas, suggestions, and themes. We weren’t selling this wine on the open market (not a high enough quantity to make it worthwhile) so we were only limited by our fertile imaginations. Okay, and time.
I am not certain who first suggested ‘Death Match Duck’, but it stuck. There was no real reasoning behind it, other than we all seemed keen to include Maggie (our Duck) in the design. As Chief Grape Taster she had been unequivocally helpful. And she had been such a big part of the whole process, helping us in the vineyard ~ weeding, eating the grapes, wandering off to visit the neighbours swimming pool ~ that it just made sense to name our first wine after her.
That explains the ‘Duck’, but ‘Death Match’.? Hmmmm. Why? …Honestly? Because we could. We liked the thought of Maggie (who would only hurt a fly) juxtaposed with the thought she could be severe. It made us smile anyway. We played with ‘Attack Duck’, ‘Devious Duck’, and various other conundrums, but Death Match Duck just felt, well, right. At least to us.
So, we had the name, now came the label. We played with Manga style duck images (well liked in a poll of the younger crowd), but in the end it seemed, somehow, wrong to not go with a picture of Maggie, as The Duck. Also, since Maggie loves to pose for photographs, finding a picture of her for the label was easy.
**Cute interval**
In fact, we spent only about 10% of our time on the image and about 90% on choosing from various fonts. We wanted a classic style label as the vineyard is on the grounds of a classic style chateau. So, the various factors came together.
We got it down to about 6 variations on the theme (mostly font changes), printed and narrowed down to the one. Then we added a red eye to Maggie to make her look more, ummm, death matchy. Et voilà
Death Match Duck
- 2015 Vendange (harvest)
- Pinot Gris Rosé
- 82 bottles
- Fresh, raspberry, fruity, surprisingly minerally and very long finish
- Sold Out
Shop Wine Lover Gifts in our Shop
As wine makers ourselves, we are always on the search for interesting, unique and particularly French wine items for our vintage and antiques shop. Here’s a taste of some of the things we have found:
Maggie is adorable!
Awwww, thank you! We think so too 🙂