Hasta La Ideas

Architect Alfredo Arribas’ ambitious Spanish winemaking projects

What happens when an architect turns vintner? In the case of Spanish architect Alfredo Arribas, the move spawned not just one winery but two—both infused with artistry from the wine itself down to illustrated labels, and of course the beautifully modern buildings housing them too. Based in the emerging wine-making regions of Priorat and the neighboring Montsant, Arribas’ project has been quietly breathing new life into the region starting in 2001 when he established Portal del Priorat.

After restoring the neglected terraced plots called closters, they were planted with clones of traditional grapes (Grenache, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah), as well as a few experimental varieties, which are all grown organically. Methods include densely planting the vines according the soil’s composition (mostly slate) and the topography The resulting wines bear witness to their creator’s ingenuity, winning praise from oenophiles for their lightness while still rich with complex flavor notes.

When I had the privilege of tasting some of the wines with Arribas himself (thanks to the design organization Red) recently at one fo Barcelona’s newest wine bars Monvinic, he explained that the taste of his wines is no accident but (of course) by design. His concept loosely revolves around adding what can only be described as the Arribas twist to reinvent both traditional winemaking but perceptions of Spanish wine.

Negre De Negres accomplishes the feat most dramatically with a blend of grapes that results in a mix of minerals, herbs and fruits, balanced by a freshness as well as a dense warmth on the palate. The inspiration for it, Arribas explained, was the experience of drinking young Greek wines but wanting to add something a little more complex to the profile. Somni, on the other hand, is more robust with oaks and tannins following a lightness that comes from black fruits.

While the wines from Portal del Priorat are all reds, more recently Arribas introduced Tossos, a red and a white wine resulting from expanding into the neighboring land of Montsant. Those along with an olive oil suggests there might be much more to look forward to from the burgeoning label.

A new comic, a handy guide for print designers, a book documenting paper making, and a new zine… Yup, it’s time to share some of the smaller, independently printed publications to land on my desk recently. First up is the latest in Nobrow‘s 17×23 series of narrative illustration books, The New Ghost, by Robert Hunter, a kind of first-day-in-the-new-office story of a ghost, new to the world of ghostly duties…

The New Ghost (£6.50) is available from nobrow.net

Art Workers: The Making of New Munken Design Range is a promotional book from Arctic Paper showing how its Munken range is created. There’s been a bit of a trend of this kind of book from manufacturers of late which reveal photographs of factories and manufacturing environments alongside portraits of the people that work there and explanations of how they all conspire, usually with industrial machinery, to create the product in question. Regular readers may recall we blogged about a similar project by UK clothes brand Albam back in November last year (read that post here). While not as ultimately collectible as Album’s clothbound, hardback book, this oversize A4 book is full of great photography of the countryside around the Munken paper mill in Sweden, along with portraits of some of the key folk who work there and, yes, some of the machinery they use in the creation of the product.

Art Workers is, unsurprisingly, printed on various Munken stock to show off the product, which is ultimately its purpose. Design: Grow in Stockholm. Photography: Daniel Blom at b-martin.se

Sporting screenprinted and hand-finished covers, A Year In The Droposphere is a new zine from French-born street artist and illustrator Florence Blanchard, aka Ema. The 48 page A5 zine, printed in an edition of 100, contains a colleciton of photos of Ema’s mostly moustachioed droplet-shaped pieces (she calls them Dropmen) which she’s installed on the streets of Paris, London, Miami and Sheffield in the form of drawings, paintings and wheatpastes during the course of the last year.

A Year In The Droposphere (€10) is available from Ema’s Big Cartel site here.

UK design agency, The Media Collective, sent in this handy little 16 page tome (approx 12 x 17.5 cm), designed as a handy reference tool for print designers. It contains examples of overprinting, explains the golden ratio, has a list of standard paper sizes detailed in millimetres, inches and picas, shows examples of how colours sit on coated and uncoated stock, shows a range of blacks created in various ways, shows various types of paper folds, and a wealth of other basic info all designers about to do a print job should know about. One thing I can’t find though is info about types of binding. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty handy booklet to have around.

It’s available for purchase for £4 from printhandbook.com

Ilinca Höpfner has directed an animated video for new Grinderman track, Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man. Like the song it’s loud, brash and just a touch NSFW…

The animated promo accompanies the lead track off Grinderman’s second album, Grinderman 2. It’s a scuzzy, scratchy, claustrophobic effort that goes really well with Nick Cave’s, ahem, direct lyrics. Though counteracting all that talk of “sucking” and “shaving” is a nice hand-jive sequence featuring the band (see above).

Via pitchfork.tv. Grinderman are signed to Mute and Anti- (in the US).

Lui è Flavio Bernandes.
{Via}

Lippincott’s new identity for office supplies company Viking uses doodles in an attempt to link the brand to office life

Viking (old logo above) is a European office supplies company owned by Office Depot. Lippincott’s UK office helped it reposition itself in a market dominated by discounting and free gifts to buyers. As part of that, a new identity system was introduced based around the idea of the doodle – something, Lippincott reasoned, that many people associate with being at work.

Thus the new, redrawn logo (shown top) is matched with a doodle drawn, apparently, by Lippincott creative director Lee Coomber.

The idea really comes alive, however, when applied to products such as copier paper

packaging

and delivery vans

It is also appplied in the 30 million (yep) catalogues that Viking has just sent out to customers across Europe

and on the website, of course

With such an approach there are worries about how sustainable it might be in the long term (will the idea quickly wear thin?) but here perhaps there is an opportunity for the doodle to be continually refreshed using a roster of illustrators and artists. If Viking could ‘own’ (sorry for the jargon) the idea of the doodle, they could do a lot with it in future.

A distinct improvement from the previous look at any rate, not least as a result of dropping the clutter of the ‘Home Depot” business line and the scaling down of the giant size ® that so many firms insist on now.

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