2024 Packaging Design

The Tiny Vineyards Wine Company is a single employee, very micro, boutique winery in Sonoma, Calif., specializing in small lots of handcrafted ultra-premium wines. Founder, winemaker and five-time eclipse chaser Joseph Daniel decided to leverage the longest and most visible total solar eclipse in the United States in 100 years, which crossed much of the country on April 8, 2024, with a commemorative release. Two-and-a-half years ago, he decided to make a commemorative “Eclipse Malbec” to celebrate the celestial event.

In 2024, with the wine bottled and appropriately labeled with a time-lapse image of the 2019 total solar eclipse over the Andes Mountains in Argentina, he then decided the biggest market for the wine was likely the populace that lived in or nearby the path of totality. In classic low-cost, grassroots marketing, he built a list of every town in the 15 states that the eclipse would pass over, and every hometown newspaper still being published in print or online in those towns. Then he sent them a press release with lots of great photos and even a pre-written story if they didn't want to do the work of writing their own.

Newspapers all along the eclipse path picked up the story and, every time it was printed, he sold some wine. That, in turn, led to larger media, including a story in Forbes Magazine and an NPR interview. As a result, the wine sold out quickly.