The Domaine Leflaive label is has changed little since its inception in the 1920s, when Joseph Leflaive decided to bottle at the property – itself an innovation at the time.
The label when first done stood out from contemporaries, because creamy ‘parchment’ colours were the fashion, but the background to Leflaive’s label was very white. Then there is the coat of arms; two cockerels on each side of a shield that contains five Saint Jacques shells: a route through Puligny-Montrachet is one of the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela (1500 kilometres away) and these shells are the symbol of the route.
Over the years, however, the label had started to become more cluttered due to successive legal necessities, such as the marking of volume, alcohol content, country of origin of the wine, Grand Vin de Bourgogne and such et-ceteras.
Now the label will be more direct and minimalist, the legal niceties having been moved to a new back-label – the coat of arms and lettering now updated with clarity in mind. I’m looking forward to getting up close and personal to them!
There is one response to “‘new old’ labels, chez leflaive…”
Here is a funny story about Leflaive labels and silly bureaucrats….
A retailer in Alberta,Canada told me how he came to get an annual allotment of Leflaive’s best wines. It seems that he was visiting the domaine when a senior employee of the domaine muttered that they had just severed business relationship with Ontario’s government liquor monopoly. It seems the monopoly had demanded bar codes on LeFlaive wines for many years but now a bureaucratic buyer had delivered an ultimatum… bar codes must go on the bottles or else they could not possibly be sold in the market of 12 million people.
Being in the right place at the right time and appreciating that more labels do not make the wine better, the independent retailer scooped up the allocation the monopoly had just walked away from. Needless to say, the wines, especially the grand crus, find many bar code-blind customers in Alberta.
Nice!