I am a printmaker as well as farmer and when we started making wine, I started making wine labels. One of the perils as a beginning winemaker however is that the wine isn't always agreeable. My first attempt at a Chianti had a lovely garnet color as I poured it all out into the compost pile..a poor quality vingear that was the result of too many "advisors" and not enough experience to follow my own judgement.
So in 2006 when we held back some of the white grapes from the Red wine we were making, we crushed and fermented them separately as an attempt to make a decent white wine for summer drinking or at least a decent cooking wine. I waited to taste the finished wine before thinking about making labels...to avoid wasting all that work.
Unfortunately, that backfired. Once I'd realized that the wine was pretty decent and got to work on the labels it was too late. By the time the labels were done, we'd drunk most of the wine.
I was left with 50 hand-made wine labels and lots of empty bottles.
Lacrime di Rospo is a woodcut carved on 1 plank of Italian beechwood and printed in brown ink on handmade Japanese paper.