Sunday, December 04, 2005

Winery Name - The wierd sometimes works

Half a month ago I mentioned the new winery in Sonoma that was soliciting blog readers for suggestions as to a name for their venture.
Sometimes, the wierd stuff works.
Locally, the new owners of the Summerland winery formerly called Scherzinger started looking for a new name. BC winery-naming whiz Bernie Hadley-Beauregard came up with something for them called Dirty Laundry. If you haven't already heard:

1) that's really the name and;
2) it's a runaway success.

Scherzinger plodded along with it's difficult to pronounce (easy if you're from a certain part of the world) name and it's traditional labels for years. It only took a couple months after the new name (label, image, life) came on line to clear the shelves of inventory and create unprecedented demand.
Origination of name? Summerland had a Chinese laundry with a whore house upstairs in the old days. Big deal. So did most towns around here. They probably still do.
But if you put the idea on a wine label and throw in a few sketches of nude female silhouettes for titillation you suddenly have a wine that is slightly risque although nothing much has changed in the bottle.
More power to you if you can get away with it.

But instead of having to rename, relabel and rebrand - why not get it right in the first place?

Try to be a little better than - "Well, hey, there's a hill over there and a bridge over there so maybe we'll call it Bridgehill or Hillbridge."

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