Founded by Mario Di Paolo in 1999, and now with offices in Pescara, Italy and Napa, California, Spazio Di Paolo specialises in packaging for international wine and spirits (See Pulp 18, the ‘Message on a bottle’ special issue). Spazio Di Paolo recently created a special limited-edition label for two wines from the family-owned Italian winery La Spinetta, established in 1977 by Giuseppe Rivetti.
Using the winery’s Barbera d’Alba and Barbaresco, this project began with a request from the Cillario family, owners of Eurostampa, who specialise in premium label manufacturing for wine and spirits. (They are also a family-owned business, founded in 1966 in Bene Vagienna, Italy by Luciano Cillario.)
These special wine releases were created with a dual purpose: first, as a tribute to the Cillario family; secondly, as a celebration of the La Spinetta winery.
Di Paolo says creative process started with La Spinetta’s visual identity, which makes use of the iconic but fanciful 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer, the German Renaissance artist, who never saw the animal. Dürer drew his rhino from a sketch and a written description he had been sent from Lisbon. (The creature had been transported by sea from India to Portugal.)
Di Paolo says, ‘For the Barbera d’Alba La Gallina, we … reinterpreted the image with a medieval metallic armour in a distinctive scarab-green shade.’ Eurostampa used several contrasting foils on a Cotone Bianco label. For the Barbaresco label, two self-adhesive papers were layered: Tintoretto Gesso for the base; Cotone Bianco for a sculpted rhinoceros using tri-dimensional plates and a die-cut. The label also features overlapping foils, which add to the modelled, almost hallucinatory quality of the label.
For more on Spazio Di Paolo, see ‘The connoisseur’ in Pulp 18.
Papers:
Cotone Bianco Ultra WS
Tintoretto Gesso Waterproof FSCTM