The Multi-Label Problem: When Brand Architecture Confuses Instead of Clarifies
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Watch someone try to reorder the wine they loved from your tasting room six months ago.
They remember your winery name. They definitely remember they loved it. But when they pull up your website, they see five different Cabernets. Was it the Reserve? The Estate? The Single Vineyard? They can't remember. They're pretty sure it had a dark label, or maybe it was the one with the silver text, or was that the other winery they visited that day?
They close the browser. They'll "come back to it later." They never do.
Or watch them at your tasting bar right now. You pour through seven wines. They like three of them. When you ask which they'd like to take home, they look at the list again, visibly overwhelmed. "I can't remember which was which. Can you pour them again?" You've just turned enthusiasm into decision paralysis.
This is the cost of proliferation. Not the obvious costs like inventory carrying or label design, but the hidden cost of customer confusion. Every wine you add to your portfolio isn't an opportunity. It's a tax on memory.
Here's the thing about wine brand architecture: most wineries create new labels to capture different price points or varietals, thinking more options means more opportunities. But each new label dilutes the equity you've built unless your brand AND business architecture follows clear identity rules.
The wine industry suffers from proliferation disease. You make seventeen different wines because you can, not because the market demands it. Then you wonder why your conversion rates are lower than they should be and why customers need so much hand-holding to make a purchase decision.
The problem isn't your wines. The problem is you're asking human memory to do something it wasn't built for.
How Memory Works
Byron Sharp's research on brand building demolishes the conventional wisdom about segmentation. His work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that distinctive assets and consistent branding beat targeted segmentation every single time.
Here's why: memory structures are built through repetition, not proliferation.
When someone sees your label once, they're forming a barely-there neural pathway. When they see variations of your label—different colors, different fonts, different names—they're not strengthening that pathway. They're creating competing pathways that interfere with each other.
Your "Reserve" and "Estate" and "Single Vineyard" tiers probably confuse more than they convert because you're asking customers to build and maintain separate memory structures for each one. Most humans can't do that with seventeen wines from seventeen different wineries, let alone seventeen wines from YOUR winery.
The wineries that dominate mental availability aren't the ones with the most SKUs. They're the ones with the most consistent, repeated brand presence. When someone thinks "Napa Cabernet," which wineries come to mind first? Not the ones with seven different Cabernet labels. The ones with ONE Cabernet everyone knows.
The Hierarchy Solution
The fix requires killing your darlings and accepting a truth most winemakers (and business owners) hate: less is more effective than more.
Here's the architecture that works:
One flagship wine that owns your brand position. This is the wine that defines you. Everything else in your portfolio exists in relation to this wine. When someone mentions your winery, this is the wine they should think of first. If you can't identify which wine this is right now, that's your first problem.
Two to three supporting wines that prove versatility without contradicting core positioning. These wines demonstrate you can do more than one thing well, but they don't compete with your flagship for mental space. They reinforce the core brand while extending reach. If your flagship is powerful Napa Cabernet, your supporting wines might be elegant Chardonnay and structured Syrah. What they can't be is five different Cabernets fighting for attention.
Everything else is relegated to tasting room specials that create urgency without confusion. Limited releases, experimental blocks, library wines, these create reasons to visit and buy now. But they're explicitly positioned as exceptions, not competing products. They don't carry the brand weight because they're not supposed to. They're profitable one-offs, not brand builders.
The principle comes from Procter & Gamble, and it's proven across every consumer category: Tide owns "powerful cleaning." Cheer owns "color protection." Dash owns "value." Each brand has one clear position.
Your Cabernet must own one position, your Chardonnay another. If you can't articulate the distinction in seven words each, you don't have distinct positions. You have inventory problems disguised as portfolio strategy.
What Position Actually Means
Position isn't a marketing slogan. It's the mental shortcut customers use when they think about your wine.
"The Cabernet for special occasions." "The everyday Chardonnay that tastes expensive." "The Pinot that doesn't taste like Pinot." "The bold red that pairs with steak."
These are positions. They're specific, memorable, and most importantly, they're singular. You can't own "the Cabernet for special occasions" and "the approachable everyday Cabernet" and "the investment-grade collector's Cabernet" simultaneously. Pick one. Build everything around it.
When Opus One launched, they didn't create a portfolio. They created one wine with one position: "the Napa first-growth." Everything about the brand reinforced that single message. The price, the label, the distribution strategy, the way they talk about it. Forty years later, people still know exactly what Opus One is and what it stands for.
Now, how many of your wines can customers describe with that clarity?
The Test
Here's how you know if your architecture works:
Hand your website to someone who's never heard of your winery. Give them thirty seconds to browse. Then ask them to name one wine they saw.
Can they do it? Can they spell it? Would they be able to find it again if they wanted to buy it?
If the answer is no, your architecture is working against you.
Try this next: Watch three customers go through a tasting. After they've tried your wines, ask them which ones they liked most. Then hand them your wine list and ask them to point to those wines. If they can't match their experience to your list without help, your naming and positioning are creating friction.
Finally, look at your own team. Can your tasting room staff explain in one sentence what makes each of your wines distinct from the others? If they resort to vintage characteristics or vineyard details or winemaking techniques, those aren't positions. Those are technical specifications customers won't remember.
The Uncomfortable Economics
This part is not fun, but needs to be said: most wineries would be more profitable with fewer wines.
The cost of maintaining seventeen SKUs—the inventory, the storage, the label designs, the compliance paperwork, the distributor education, the menu space, the mental load on everyone who has to explain the portfolio—that cost almost never pays back through incremental sales.
What actually happens is you spread your marketing budget across too many products. Your flagship gets 1/17th of the attention it needs. Your distributors push whatever was selling last month. Your customers get confused and buy less overall.
The wineries that cut their portfolio to 3-5 core wines and position each one distinctly typically see better margins, stronger brand recognition, and higher per-bottle prices. Not despite the smaller portfolio, but because of it.
Fixing This Without Starting Over
You don't have to kill every wine tomorrow, I’m not going that far. But you do need to establish a clear hierarchy starting now.
Identify your flagship. The wine that best represents what you want to be known for. Pour all your brand-building effort into this wine. This is the one that goes on the homepage. This is the one your distributors lead with. This is the one you talk about in press. Everything else is secondary.
For your supporting wines, audit whether they actually support the flagship or compete with it. If you have three Cabernets at three price points, pick one to be THE Cabernet and position the others explicitly as different occasions or different expressions. Or better yet, consolidate them. The mid-tier wine that nobody can remember isn't helping you.
For everything else, embrace the tasting room special model. Limited production, direct-to-consumer only, creates urgency and profitability without demanding brand budget or mental space.
The goal isn't to make fewer wines because fewer is virtuous. The goal is to build memory structures through repetition. Every time someone sees your flagship label, you're strengthening the neural pathway that makes them think of you. Every time you introduce another competing label, you're weakening that pathway.
What This Comes Down To
Brand architecture isn't about organizing your wines. It's about organizing your customer's memory.
You're not competing against other wineries just at the point of sale. You're competing for mental availability, the likelihood that when someone wants wine, they think of you. That mental availability is built through consistent, repeated exposure to distinctive brand assets.
Every time you add a new label, you're asking customers to remember something new. Every time you create visual inconsistency across your portfolio, you're making it harder for them to recognize you. Every time you muddy your positioning with overlapping products, you're giving them a reason to choose someone simpler.
The wineries winning this game aren't the ones with the most options. They're the ones customers can remember and recognize instantly, every single time.
If your customers can't remember which wine they loved enough to reorder it, your architecture is broken.
Fix the architecture. Build the memory structure. Win the mental space.
That's how you actually grow.
Adam Bird is Director of Strategy at Highway 29 Creative. He works with wineries that realize their seventeen-label portfolio isn't the asset they thought it was, and helps them build brand architectures that customers can actually remember and buy from with confidence.