This is Dianne with her daughter Ruth West, who is the model for the lovely lady in the Müller Thurgau and Madeleine Angevine images. (Photo taken on a cold winter day so we're all huddled in thick jackets, by MikeL - 12-Dec-2006.) (full size image 421Kb .jpg)

And this is Dianne with her other daughter Mary, who is the model for the lovely lady in the Melon de Bourgogne image. (Again, photo taken on a cold winter day so we're all huddled in thick jackets, by MikeL - 09-Feb-2009.) (full size image 408Kb .jpg)

The artworks were each done entirely by Dianne. The bordering, choice of fonts and wording that reduce the beauty of the overall work were done entirely by Mike Lempriere -- apologies for my lack of artistic sensitivity. The originals are on display in our humble winery -- please come visit us to see them.

Below are the pieces and their stories, in the order they were created.

Müller Thurgau
Commissioned in 2006 for our dry white wine made from 100% Muller Thurgau grapes.
First used on the vintage 2005 release.
Copyright © 2006 Perennial Vintners.

I asked Dianne to use our vineyard as the basis of an image for the label and left it pretty much at that. The final piece was simply a more thorough version of her initial piece -- although I didn't really know what I wanted, she found it!

Madeleine Angevine
Commissioned in 2008 for our dry white 100% Madeleine Angevine grape wine.
First used on the vintage 2007 release.
Copyright © 2008 Perennial Vintners.

Upon finishing our second wine, I asked Dianne for another work in the style established with the first piece both artistically and thematically. With a little back-and-forth on the lovely lady (I felt she had to have longer hair), we arrived fairly directly at this image.

Ichigo
Commissioned in 2008 for our strawberry port-style dessert wine.
First used on the 2008 release.
Copyright © 2008 Perennial Vintners.

"Ichigo" is the Japanese word for strawberry -- with this release we honored the Japanese/American strawberry farming heritage of Bainbridge Island. As the wine is packaged in a narrow 500mL bottle (click link above to see bottle photo), there was very little room for detailed artwork. These constraints brought Dianne to do this simple Sumi-styled strawberry.

Frambelle.
Commissioned in 2008 for our raspberry port-style dessert wines.
First used on the 2008 release.
Copyright © 2008 Perennial Vintners.

This is a small bottle (same a Ichigo above) with very limited space for artwork. "frambelle" is a made-up word combining the French words for raspberry (framboise) and beautiful (belle). I asked Dianne for a simple piece and she provided exactly what was needed, a beautiful cluster of raspberries.