Okanagan winemaker puts a cork in punny bottles after Dom Perignon complaint
The self-described scoundrels of Okanagan wine nation have pulled one in every of their hottest glowing wines after a warning from one of many world’s most well-known and prestigious producers, Dom Perignon.
The cheekily-named “Dom and Dommerer” bottles produced by Crown and Thieves vineyard are actually recalled and boxed up in a warehouse as a result of the label sports activities the identical three-pointed protect silhouette because the distinctive French champagne.
“I was walking in the vineyard one day and in the snow I saw these cute little footprints and it had a really neat shape,” stated winemaker Jason Parkes. “And the team’s favourite movie is ‘Dumb and Dumber.’”
But when he obtained a stop and desist letter from the legal professionals for the legendary French producer, he knew the light-hearted joke with its duck-foot label had fizzled out.
“I didn’t think we’d get away with it for six months, and it’s been longer than that,” he stated. “They’re actually a very, very classy company, all kidding aside, and they’ve been very kind and I think they’ve seen some of the humour.”
A dear joke
Parkes, who fronts a punk band in his downtime, eschews the numerous awards his wines have garnered and continues to develop his choices with a cidery, a BBQ-themed restaurant, and a number of wine manufacturers.
He’s glad he diversified contemplating that he wrote off this 12 months’s grape harvest, having seen how small and questionable it will be after a chilly snap that has decimated all the business. That means he’s underneath further stress to re-brand and re-label the Dom and Dommerer bottles and get them again available on the market.
“We’ll just have to come up with something clever and maybe an homage to someone else in some fun way,” Parkes stated. “It’s valuable, we’ll fix it, we’ll make it work and be creative.”
An outlier within the business
It’s usually the craft beer business that will get in sizzling water over brewers’ puckish pendant for performs on phrases and puns that land them in court docket or pulling merchandise from cabinets.
Parkes is clearly a fan of tongue-in-cheek humour as effectively, together with his common, award-winning community of wineries sporting irreverent names together with Pinky Blinders, Auxerrois that Endserrois, and The Greatest Love of Mal, usually sporting whimsical watercolour work or art work by his kids on the labels.
While numerous wineries are up on the market within the area given the challenges of repeated droughts, wildfires, and this 12 months’s chilly snap, Parkes is intent on sticking it out and hoping for higher harvests within the years forward.
