A matter of taste
Whats in a name?
“Do you add flies to your wine?”
“Sure, we crush them up and sprinkle a little into each bottle for complexity.”
We often get queried about our distinct label choice, and frankly a tiny family business such as ours can’t afford to be unnoticed on such a crowded stage as the Australian Wine industry—so the provocative branding is deliberate.
A blowfly was about the most obviously inappropriate creature we could think of to adorn a wine label. But if you care to scratch a little deeper there is a little more to the story… than just being a fly in the ointment. After all The Australian Mint saw fit to copy our lead!
We’re constantly surrounded by advertising informing us just how objectively tasty certain wines are… via point scores, medals and authoritative reviews. So we wanted to remind people that taste isn’t objective—it’s a deeply personal, subjective thing. In a nutshell, Blowfly wants to challenge your very concept of taste. And this is as much because what we attempt to put into our bottles is not typical of Australian wines. They were designed to flaunt their innate quirky personalities... not to please the accountant.
And this brings us to our new… old label. We wanted to show the beauty we see in the blowfly that our original [Pantone 454 C vector] Blowfly didn’t quite embody. And we do mean beauty. In a world that’s so saturated with bold colour and movement and the pursuit of photoshopped perfection, it's easy miss the funky little details. We love those little details. There’s beauty in those details.
One little detail we’d like to draw attention to is the hard-to-make-out white scribble below the fly’s right wing— “S. Greenstreet”. Rather than approach an advertising firm, or simply download an iStock image, we approached a local budding artist, Sharon Greenstreet, to draw our fly. She immediately understood what we were trying to do and embraced our little project. And in her drawing she captured every tiny detail of the fly.
So what we present here and on every bottle of “BLOWFLY [rogue]” is an individual work of art created using coloured pencil... illustrating beauty in the grotesque. The colours are subdued in the style of the old natural history illustrations. The real-life ‘green bottle’ fly is wildly iridescent with eyes of unrestrained scarlet.
We think it a thing of beauty. Perhaps you do too... perhaps you don’t. You may well on the other hand love the wine beneath the label. That’s a matter of taste, of courser. It’s all just a matter of taste. And that’s all that matters. As Hamlet said "...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
As for the [rogue], for various reasons some of our wines defied labels and never received a Blowfly guernsey Some pallets were missed in audits, some were put aside for export, and some simply aged much more slowly under the new (at the time) screw cap closure.
The wines have made appearances in masterclasses, at dinners, and some are even currently on subscription. Now they are all mature [rogue]’s and available for purchase in our online store.
