Auteur Winery: Life of Wine

As a winemaker-driven brand, our focus and passion at AUTEUR is to create profound, pure and classic wines embodying each varietal’s masculine and feminine characteristics. To achieve this balance, we meticulously farm exceptional and unique vineyards in cool microclimates of coastal California and Oregon. Vineyard selection and understanding the individuality of these sites is critical to achieving true expression in our AUTEUR wines. Cool climate allows for a longer growing season to ensure optimal ripeness while maintaining natural acidity. Ensuring vine health in combination with proper stress, intense and early crop thinning in the growing season, and slight leaf shading, create fruit of great depth and concentration. As a result, extraction is effortless and cap manipulation can be kept to a minimum to retain aromatics and nuance. Every year presents its unique set of parameters that motivate and channel our energy to create the best wine while paying respect to the characteristics of each individual vintage and the fruit that was grown.

Owner/Winemaker, Kenneth Juhasz has worked in the industry over the last sixteen years with meticulous, obstinate and well respected standards of excellence throughout California, Oregon and New Zealand. Along with AUTEUR, Kenneth consults with several wineries, among them being, Donum Estate, Pali Wine Company and Semper. Kenneth and Laura, his wife and AUTEUR partner, live in the heart of wine country in the beautiful town of Sonoma with their two young daughters.

As we approached our tenth year, we reflected on the past, present and future of Auteur. While we adore and appreciate the charm of our original orange label, we were inspired to revise our image creating a more sophisticated and rarified package, to paragon the maturing image of AUTEUR with our strive for excellence in premium winemaking.

The Design Exercise

Originally, the AUTEUR package expressed a gestural, calligraphic typeface and autumnal color-scheme as its primary visual components. Although pleasant visually, it did not express the attitude of premium, single-vineyard wines produced in low quantities. We came to understand that our market has high-expectations and biases about the way a bottle of wine registers in their lexicon of premium wines. That prompted a revision of our image in order to mature the brand. We sought to make the package's complexion more sophisticated and rarified.