What award-winning wine packaging has in common: 6 lessons from PACK winners
What six editions of PACK Design Awards winners have in common, with judges' comments and the renders they scored. Six lessons for your next label.
The judges of the Wine Business Monthly PACK Design Awards never hold the bottle. For six editions, 2021 to 2026, every entry has been judged on the same kind of image: a photorealistic render built from the label file, front and back, on the exact glass and closure the winery specified. Outshinery produced every one of them.
That makes PACK an unusual dataset. When lighting, angle and photography are identical across the field, the only variable left is the design.
We went back through all six winners pages, 120 placings across first, second and third place, Best in Show and People's Choice, and read every judge's comment. Five patterns repeat, year after year, price point after price point.
Each one below is carried by a 2026 winner, shown on the image the judges scored. The sixth is one only the rendering side can see.
How the PACK Design Awards are judged
Five categories: Classic (750ml), Luxury ($40 and up), Best Package Series, Package Redesign and Alternative or non-glass format. Independent judges from retail, on-premise, ecommerce and wine writing score each package on visual appeal, design functionality and fit for the price segment.
Since 2026 the scoring works like a wine competition. A package scoring 85 percent or more of available points earns Gold, 80 to 85 earns Silver, 75 to 80 earns Bronze, and the highest score overall is Best in Show. People's Choice is a separate public vote.
Judges see the front and the back of every bottle, rendered at the same scale under the same light. They also read the winery's own notes. Their comments are published with each entry, which is where the first five lessons come from.
Lesson 1: real art beats decoration
The 2026 Best in Show went to a $20 Pinot Noir. One Stone Cellars, from Ancient Peaks Winery in Paso Robles, puts an original canvas painting by artist Audrey Jackson on every label, and a share of proceeds funds mentorship for women in wine.
The judges' words: "Gorgeous. These work well together and will inspire customers to buy all three. They feel as if you are collecting works of art while enjoying wine."
Another wrote that customers "will want to save the label."
This is not a one-year result. The same idea placed first in the Series category in 2022, third in Classic in 2023, and swept 2026 with Best in Show, Classic first and Series first. The brushwork is real, the cause is real, and the judges could tell.
The lesson for designers: judges reward an image that is grounded in something true about the wine. Stock illustration reads as filler at any price point. A commissioned painting, a founder's story, a place, a person, all read as authentic, and authenticity is what the judges keep naming.
Lesson 2: say who it is for, then tell them everything
FitVine Free is a $14.99 non-alcoholic wine with electrolytes and adaptogens, which is a hard brief. The design has to signal wellness, sophistication and fun on one label, in a category built on indulgence.
Interact's answer was a running figure, color blocking per varietal, the name "Power Red," and a back label that carries nutrition facts, tasting notes and the social commitment.
One judge summed it up: "Pretty perfect. You know exactly what the wine is and who it is for. They did not miss a thing."
The pattern runs through every edition. Sunny with a Chance of Flowers (2023) put calories and zero sugar on the front, and Zolo Zero (2024) led with a zero.
Obvious Wines (2026) put the whole proposition in the brand name. In each case a judge praised the clarity before the aesthetics.
Wine journalist and PACK judge Sara Schneider put the rule plainly in Wine Business Monthly: "There can't be an attempt to grab attention without authenticity, without it being grounded in something true about that wine." She also named the most common failure she sees in entries: labels that leave out the grape source, the blend and the vineyard.
Outside wine, the same finding shows up in attention research. In Dragonfly AI and Mintel's modeled scoring of packs across 49 categories, the top one percent beat the average by more on Clarity than on Visibility. Being understood beats being seen.
Lesson 3: a redesign keeps one thing and cuts the rest
Parducci is Mendocino County's longest continuously operating winery. Its $17.99 Pinot Noir redesign by DesignCraft kept exactly one element from the old label, John Parducci's signature, and rebuilt everything around it: bold color blocking, textured paper, a lot of empty space.
"This one stands out! It's all about the name. And they did it in bright red to make the point," wrote one judge.
Another: "I like the move to more of a billboard effect."
Every Redesign winner since 2021 followed the same move. Le Vigne (2021) dropped the paper label for a silkscreened stick figure. Waterbrook (2022) kept its font and changed the logo, and Bien Nacido (2023) kept the adobe house and went black and gold.
Lasseter's L'Ame du Sage, the 2024 Best in Show, was praised for a back label where "the words have room to breathe." Ancient Peaks' Renegade, the 2025 Best in Show, kept its colors and turned the script vertical.
The judges' comments on redesigns use the same vocabulary each year: cleaner, more modern, looks more expensive. Nobody has ever won Redesign by adding elements.
The practical test for a Creative Partner presenting a redesign: name the one thing a loyal buyer will use to find the bottle again, keep it, and be able to say why everything else went.
Lesson 4: shelf pop is a color decision, not a budget one
Cycles Gladiator retails at $12.99. Its refresh by Bronco's in-house designer Hailey Finkel kept the famous poster illustration and changed almost nothing except the palette: a sky-blue background, a bright capsule, cleaner type, a touch of gold foil.
A judge called it "somewhat of a masterclass in getting more pop on the shelf out of what you already have." The public agreed and voted it People's Choice.
The lowest-priced winners across six editions all won this way. Cherry Blossom at $4.99 and Petals at $7.99 (both 2026) and Wise Villa's $5.75 can (2022) were praised for being bright and immediately readable from a distance, not for materials.
Foil, emboss and heavy paper win in the Luxury category, where the price supports them. Below $20, the judges' comments reward contrast, one bold color and typography that can be read across an aisle.
Lesson 5: new formats win when the pack explains itself
Obvious Wines took both the judges' first place and the public vote in the Alternative category with a $26.99 three-liter box. Oversized type, one message, no pretense, and a spout tab that reads "Push here, pour you."
"This is clear. You know what you're going to get, there are no pretenses," wrote one judge. Another said it would "stick out compared to other box wines in a good way."
Every non-glass winner since 2021 has done the same thing: put the reason for the format on the pack. Element[AL]'s aluminum bottle (2024) and Nature's Grace's paper bottle (2025) both drew comments about back labels that "tell the why." Really Good Boxed Wine (2023) was praised for pairing pointers and tasting notes on the side of the box.
The judges are receptive to cans, boxes, paper and aluminum. What they mark down is a new format that expects the buyer to work out why it exists.
Lesson 6: the winners arrive organized
The judges never see this one. I do, because every entry passes through the Outshinery Studio queue before it reaches them, and after six editions the pattern in the submissions is as clear as the pattern in the results.
The packages that place tend to arrive complete: print-ready files for every label, both versions for a redesign, the glass mold and closure named, the finishes called out. And they come with one clear decision maker who reviews the proof and answers the same day.
The newer the files, the sharper the entrant's sense of what the branding and packaging were about. The winners are organized and confident. They know what the package is supposed to say, so there is nothing left to work out at the proof stage.
It is not that tidy files win awards. It is that a brand that has a current, finished label file and someone who can approve it has usually also done the thinking the first five lessons describe.
What the six lessons have in common
Read together, the six lessons are one rule from different angles. The judges reward packaging that tells the truth about the wine, its buyer and its price, and they can tell the difference from an image alone.
That last part matters for anyone entering. The judges never touch the paper stock or feel the emboss, they see a render of it.
If a finish is not visible in the image, it does not exist for the score. The harder problem is the opposite one: a finish that is too visible.
Metallic foil is the usual case. Gold or silver has to read as shiny metal in the image, and the brand name printed on it still has to be legible at thumbnail size.
We are always finding the compromise between accuracy and brand recognition: how much shine on the foil keeps it honest to the print, without the name disappearing into it.
That balance is set by hand on every PACK render, and it is the reason a $20 bottle with a foil brand name and a $200 bottle with an etched glass logo are judged on equal footing.
A note for the designers
Before Outshinery, I designed wine labels. My first won Best of Show at the San Francisco Wine Labels Competition, and twenty of my designs were shown at SFMOMA in the "How Wine Became Modern" exhibition. So this part is from one designer to another.
You sweat every detail. You chose the paper, the foil, the varnish, the exact weight of the type. Then the last step, the image that carries all of that into the world, is a poor product photo.
That image is not only for the competition. It lives on the website, in the trade press, in the distributor's portfolio, on the retailer's listing. When your label gets a feature in a newspaper, do not let the work go to waste on a bad photo.
That frustration is one of the main reasons I started Outshinery.
What this means for your next entry
Every PACK entry is rendered by Outshinery Studio from the print-ready label file, the glass mold and the closure spec. A trained 3D artist builds the front and back shot, including foil, emboss, deboss, varnish and wax, so a $20 bottle and a $200 bottle get the same craft.
For a design studio, that changes the brief. You are not shipping a sample to a photographer and hoping the foil catches the light. You are sending the file you already made, and the finishes you specified are what the judges see.
It also means the images outlive the competition. Entrants keep them, and winners use them on the winery's storefront, in distributor decks and in the studio's own portfolio. Several of the 2026 first-place and People's Choice brands also received a complimentary Studio Beauty shot, a styled scene built around the same 3D model.
Outshinery has served more than 2,000 beverage brands, and the same process behind every PACK entry is how any wine bottle branding visual gets made: from the label file, without a photoshoot. See more of the work in the showcase, or read how the PACK partnership works before entries open on October 13, 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What are the current trends in wine label design?
Across the last six PACK Design Awards, the winning trends are simplification in redesigns, front labels that state who the wine is for (calories, zero alcohol, sustainability certification), original commissioned art instead of stock illustration, bright single-color palettes under $20, and alternative formats that explain their own reason for existing on the pack.
What are some creative ideas for wine labels?
Ideas that placed at PACK: an original painting per wine (One Stone Cellars), a label that changes with a lunar or celestial event (Eclipse Malbec, 2024), a rotating sleeve that reveals hidden art (The Ordinary Fellow, 2023), a second label printed on the back of the front label and read through the glass (Dry Creek Vineyard, 2022), and a spout tab with a line of copy on it (Obvious Wines, 2026). Each one ties back to something true about the wine.
How are the PACK Design Awards judged?
Independent judges from wine retail, on-premise, ecommerce and wine writing score each entry on visual appeal, design functionality and fit for the price segment, using front and back renders produced by Outshinery from the entrant's label files. Since 2026, packages scoring 85 percent or more of available points earn Gold, 80 to 85 Silver and 75 to 80 Bronze, with the top score named Best in Show. A separate public vote decides People's Choice.
Do you need photography to enter a wine packaging award?
Not for PACK. Entrants send print-ready label artwork and their bottle and closure details, and Outshinery renders the front and back images used for judging, so no sample bottle is shipped and no photoshoot is booked. Entrants keep the images after the competition.
