poster art // Kokomo Winery Winemaker’s Dinner 2019

Honored to provide poster art for Kokomo Winery’s Winemaker Dinner for the third year in a row!

 

poster art // Kokomo Winemaker Dinner 2018

It’s time again for our friends at California’s Kokomo Winery to host their annual Winemaker Dinner—we created the poster art again this year, using themes of roots, smoke, fire, lava, valleys, estuaries, and looking ahead to new days…

poster art // 2017 Winemaker’s Dinner at Kokomo Winery

Our friends at Kokomo Winery take their terroir seriously…we tapped into that idea with our poster art!

epicurean film // Gun Bun x BUNK

We took a day trip down to Portland, Oregon to catch up with Huichica Music Festival co-founder and Fruitbats frontman Eric D. Johnson and Portland’s famous BUNK Sandwiches chef Tommy Habetz.  The two talked endlessly about their mutual love for sandwiches and rock and roll—we managed to capture a few tidbits along with details on Tommy’s sandwich pairing with Gundlach Bundschu’s Mountain Cuvée wine at this year’s upcoming Huichica Music Festival.

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Huichica Music Festival
presented by Jeff Bundschu, Gundlach Bundschu Winery
and Eric D. Johnson, Fruit Bats

film by
The Art Dept.

Muffuletta sandwich by
BUNK Sandwiches

music by
Jeff Bundschu

brochure // Gundlach Bundschu Heritage Wines

The good people at Gundlach Bundschu Winery tapped us to design a small printed piece introducing their premium Heritage Wines to their most exclusive customers.

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award-winning video // A Brief History of Merlot

First—credit where credit is due. Once upon a time a wonderful, whimsical, wry little nugget of a narrative seeded itself in the brain of Gundlach Bundschu Winery Marketing Director Susan Sueiro. Perhaps (just maybe) after sipping on a glass of Gun Bun Merlot—a come-hither, ruby slipper of a wine, that—under the right circumstances—transports you over the rainbow. It’s no laughing matter, this wine. It’s just, well, much maligned. How to tell its story with winks rather than winces?

After what we can only imagine was a richly inspirational foray sliding down various rainbows, one of the things Susan did after putting fingers to keyboard was to call us. And we’re so glad she did. Our own Art Director Peter and Susan together finessed the script and shot list so as to make it possible to capture in one day, Peter clicked his heels down to California and ta-dah, they did it. One day. By jove. Peter behind the lens, Susan directing, coordinating scenes, costumes, wings, prayers and wine.

Back home Peter edited, nipped, tucked and nipped some more. Refined the flow and polished the audio, added graphics and selected the songs. Creative Director Sarah said things like, “That looks good,” and “Nuh-uh” and “But…” (She was pregnant anyways.) Peter burned the midnight oil night after night. He felt he owed it to Merlot. And Susan. And rainbows.

Their efforts paid off. Last month A Brief History of Merlot nabbed Wine Spectator’s 2012 Annual Video Contest.

A Brief History of Merlot humorously depicts the trials and tribulations of a varietal misunderstood—even shunned—in the aftermath of the movie Sideways, before its redemptive return to greatness.

After its debut in March of this year, A Brief History of Merlot quickly went viral on YouTube—accruing nearly 20,000 hits in a matter of weeks as major media outlets and blogs across the wine world shared in collective laughter before passing it along. It currently boasts more than 36,000 views.

The video was then submitted to Wine Spectator’s sixth annual video contest this August, where it won the popular vote. According to Wine Spectator, this year’s competition drew entries from all over the world and broke the record for the largest number of voters.

So there you have it. The little Art Dept. video that could. Proving that anything is possible if you put a little blood, sweat and tears into it.

Thanks to all the voters out there who displayed phenomenal taste in choosing A Brief History of Merlot. Thanks to our creative friends at GunBun for having faith in us, for their good wine and their great storytelling.

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video // Metropolitan Market celebrates local

We love supporting our local market—especially when they support local farms and producers.  Metropolitan Market has become a go-to source for excellent, locally-sourced foods and we’ve recently had the good fortune to work with them as a client.

A couple months ago they asked us to capture a few of nearby vendors for a series of short videos as part of a “Celebrate Local” campaign.  Visiting local farms, orchards and distilleries and learning a little about them while making a video was more like fun than work for us. Drinking a cold soda outside a circa 1935 grocery store in the middle of pastoral farmlands while waiting to meet a berry farmer—it’s right up our alley!

Take a look for yourselves:
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video // Turkey Loves Gewürz

Turkey and Gewürz—love at first sight.

Gundlach Bundschu Winery is not a winery known for its subtlety. Boasting every sort of farce and frolick under its 152-year-old belt— from hijacking the Napa Wine Train to kidnapping Sir Richard Branson—Gun Bun, the oldest family-run winery in California, is rather adored for its puckish reputation as much as for legendary wines such as Gewürztraminer. (In Wine Country, there’s an inveterate truth that you’ll surely fail a sobriety test if you can’t properly pronounce “Gundlach Bundschu Gewürztraminer.” )

So, in the end, it only made sense that the fine people at Gun Bun called us up the other day to impart, “We want to dress Jeff Bundschu up in a turkey costume and have you film some videos about how well holiday turkeys go with our Gewürztraminer!”

Above is the first of three short videos we shot and edited about a turkey and his unquenchable thirst for Gundlach Bundschu Gewürztraminer.

And below are the second and third—Turkey Bowling taken to a whole new level and a refreshing plunge into Gewurz, respectively:

SanFrancisco magazine // Scribe is The Best!

 

Sarah was delighted to oblige Editor Bruce Kelley when he asked her for a brief write-up on the bohemian wonderland of our friends’ Scribe Winery for the latest edition of San Francisco Magazine’s Best of the Bay Area:

“Rarely have backwoods and bohemian gone together so well—or with such underground notice—as they have at Andrew Mariani’s two-year-old Scribe Winery. There’s scarcely more than a crude wooden sign to it off Napa Road in Sonoma, but rampant word of mouth among the city’s celebrity artists and artisans has generated a following that thrives not only on the wine but also on the loose party scene. The 256-acre property has a checkered history spanning everything from turn-of-the-century winery to bootleggers’ brothel to industrial turkey farm…”

To read the rest, be sure to pick up a copy at your local news stand or click here!