Black Elephant Vintners just won the Explore Sideways Design Innovation Award in which we partnered up with the Cape’s prominent innovator, Michael Jordaan, to uncover the wineries that are doing unprecedented things with regards to design. After running a series of twitter polls to attain votes, BE Vintners was voted number one! Our interview with proprietor Kevin Swart shows how design has an impact on the market.

ES: What’s the inspiration behind the name Black Elephant and the logo?

BE: The 3 founders, Kevin Swart (Black in Afrikaans), Raymond Ndlovu (Elephant in Zulu) and Jacques Wentzel (Vintner)

ES: Why have you created so many sub-labels with different names versus one brand for all your wines?

BE: We started by making wine then labelling and then forming the company, so Black Elephant Vintners was the last name we created. Makes life more interesting to have different stories for each wine as opposed the norm of a global brand.

ES: What’s the inspiration behind each of the labels?

BE: 2DPH – tells the story of Franschhoek, by putting the bottle on it side and rotating clockwise. First came the Dutch to the valley, see the homestead die cut, then the French Huguenots, inverted Y, to live in SA, Y on its side represents the SA Flag. As there are too many animals, big 5 etc on SA labels we are having a bit of fun with and strange collection of “non-african”animals.

ES: What’s the creative process you come up with to create each of your labels and their positioning?

BE: Just kind of springs out of the air, based on an experience thought that we associate whilst making the wine. We brief this to our designer and he kind of pulls it together.

ES: You offer a music and wine pairing? How does that fit in and what does that entail?

BE: The food/chocolate/bitong etc pairings are quite common nowadays and we were looking for something a bit different, I think we are wanna be rock singers. So we put wine together with the wine to help tell the story of what we are trying get across with the individual wines. We play a song during the tasting of wine and explain why we chose it, this is a constantly evolving discussion as we come across more and more songs.