Paradoxical Entity

A good friend of mine said her friend Martin Rios is going to be participating in the AIDS/LifeCycle event.  It’s a bike-a-thon that will take place June 3-9, 2007 where cyclists and volunteers will travel 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  AIDS/LifeCycle is sponsored by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center to increase awareness and knowledge about HIV/AIDS and to raise money to provide the critical services and education needed to meet the growing needs of the community. Take a look and give what you can.

Hayley from Crushpad has taken over from Jenny to help me work on my wine label design.  I didn’t post earlier, but Jenny had sent me her edits of my original Whetwater Winery label design just before I changed my winery name to Serial Beggar Endeavors.  When Jenny passed me to Hayley, I guess the last couple of emails about the name change didn’t get forwarded to Hayley.  Here are Hayley’s designs on the Whetwater label.  After I gave Hayley my SBE design, she came up with these designs.

Well, I’m not particulary impressed with these efforts by both of them so far.  I’v seen some pretty impressive label designs of the past vintages at Crushpad and I have to wonder who created them?  

There’s something that’s been puzzling me for quite a while.  It’s in regards to the people I see in the subway pulling along one of those carry-on sized wheeled luggage.  In evitably, when they go to exit, they almost always choose to go out by squeezing in the rotating door gate even though there are turnstiles right next to it.  Why do they risk jamming themselves and their bag up in the rotating door gate? 

Alright. Building on my Serial Beggar persona, I give you Serial Beggar Endeavors! SBE will take over where Whetwater Winery left off and will bring front for my 2006 Pinot Noir.  Here’s the draft design for the new label that I sent to Crushpad’s resident designer to tweak.  This is a higher impact look to go with the “edgier” name.  Do you like it?

The more observant of you out there will notice that I’m not using the “Mavin” brand as I did, i.e. intended to, with Whetwater Winery to represent my Pinot Noir line of wines. Yeah, I have big plans. I dropped it mainly because I couldn’t fit into this new design. The “SBE” graphic is rather dominant. Oh, well. 

While watching the Wine Library TV review of the Viognier from Catie’s Corner Vineyard gave me a lot of confidence to make a barrel from there too, the winery who’s Viognier it was troubled me.  They are Whetstone Wine Cellars.  I immediately caught the similarity to my intended Whetwater Winery name.  What are the chances that there would be two “whet…” names producing the same wine using the same source?

The possibility the names can be confused really concerned me, especially if it can imply that I was trying to ride the coattails of an established and successful producer.  I don’t want this blemish to hang on me even if my efforts remain a hobby. It was a tough decision, but I’m going to be the gentleman and step down. The Whetwater Winery name is now retired, even before it could be revealed in public. 

“Whetwater” has a lot of sentimental value to me. I was quite pleased that I was able to manifest a bit of family trivia into the word “whetwater”.  I’ll shelve it for now and see if I can use it for something else in the future.