A Golden A' Design Award winner demonstrates how fairytale aesthetics create premium positioning.
The phrase Once Upon a Time carries universal power, and Giovanni Murgia recognized exactly that potential when designing the Cera Una Volta label for Sardinian winery Cantine Chessa. The design deliberately departs from the client's established minimal aesthetic to create a distinct product language. Sara Pilloni's illustration depicts a young girl flying alongside a swallow, guided toward her dream. The imagery communicates ancestral wisdom, personal journey, and winemaking heritage without requiring explanatory paragraphs. What makes the approach particularly clever: Cantine Chessa already had elegant, refined packaging that appealed to wine tourists. The fairytale departure signals that Cera Una Volta represents something genuinely different within the portfolio, a wine born from traditional techniques deserving its own visual vocabulary. The name itself, translating to Once Upon a Time, borrows storytelling language that resonates across cultures.
The tactile dimension elevates the concept from visual storytelling to physical experience. The label paper features a special coating that mimics fabric texture, creating a soft, silky sensation when consumers handle the bottle. Embossing techniques add dimensional qualities that invite exploration. The transparent burgundy bottle reveals the wine's golden color, allowing product and packaging to work together as a unified presentation. A coordinating box for three-bottle purchases uses identical materials, maintaining sensory consistency across touchpoints. The Cera Una Volta wine label earned a Golden A' Design Award in Packaging Design, recognizing how the project integrates narrative concept, material innovation, and systematic design thinking. For boutique wine brands seeking to connect with quality-conscious consumers who value provenance and personal stories, the project demonstrates that packaging investment in unexpected textures and deliberate aesthetic departures can create memorable differentiation.
Packaging that feels different performs different work in consumer minds. The Cera Una Volta project shows boutique brands how strategic contrast with existing portfolio aesthetics, combined with tactile surprise, transforms commercial products into conversation pieces. Wine enthusiasts who seek stories alongside quality find them in fabric-textured labels and illustrated journeys. What stories might your brand tell through unexpected materials?
