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Pewter isn't only for tankards

EOS Estate Winery crafts a specialty port wine that’s decorated with a pewter label imported from France.

EOS Winery's graceful port bottle is adorned with an oval p-s label made of embossed flexible pewter.
EOS Winery's graceful port bottle is adorned with an oval p-s label made of embossed flexible pewter.

Tankards and picture frames made of pewter are common enough. But EOS Estate Winery, Paso Robles, CA, is using a pewter label on its bottles of port wine.

They have their reasons, according to Kerry Vix, EOS general manager and partner, At about $1/label, it’s not a material for the faint of heart or the faint of budget. But when EOS winemaker Steve Felten created this zinfandel-based port, Vix knew it demanded something special in packaging.

“We wanted something that people would have to pick up and say, ‘Ooh, wow, look at this!’” Vix reports. Along with his son Christopher, director of marketing, and graphic designer Mark Folkrod of Artfarm Studios (Atascadero, CA), Vix made up the team behind EOS Paso Robles Zinfandel Port and its unusual package.

Eos, according to Greek mythology, is the goddess of dawn, which personifies a new beginning or new start. So when the Vix family took over the winery, EOS became the flagship brand. It’s also an acronym for Exceptional Onological Series, and onology is the European spelling for enology, the study of wine. So it really has a double meaning for the central California Coast vintner.

Four years ago, Felten produced a scant four barrels of port, just as an experiment. The winery bottled those four barrels after it was aged for two years. “It sold very quickly through our visitor center and in our wine club,” Vix says. “So we knew we had a new product. In total, the barrels yielded just 200 cases of port.

$27 for a split

EOS bottles the new port only in a 375-mL bottle that it retails for $27. So it’s not a product for mass consumption. In fact, the winery tightly controls where the product is marketed because it is a specialty.

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