A wine label has to look nice. A spirits label has to look nice, prove it isn't lying to you, and, in at least one case, survive being operated by a cat. Labels get treated as the last decision in making a drink — the sticker that goes on once the actual work is done — but a surprising amount of design and legal history is crammed onto that small rectangle of paper.
The queue that made a red triangle the world's first trademark
Before 1876, there was no such thing as a registered trademark in Britain — which meant no way to stop a rival brewer from copying your label wholesale and selling an inferior pint under your good name. When the Trade Mark Registration Act finally opened for applications on the first of January that year, the Bass Brewery in Burton upon Trent wasn't taking any chances: the story goes that a clerk was sent to queue outside the registrar's office overnight so Bass would be first through the door when it opened. It worked. Bass's red triangle became UK trademark number one, and it's such a recognisable piece of Victorian branding that Édouard Manet painted it, sitting on the bar, in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in 1882. A label had officially become property worth queuing all night for.
A mechanical cat, and the gin that came out of its paw
Gin's label history starts somewhere odder: not on a bottle at all, but on a wall. After the Gin Act of 1751 made spirits harder and more expensive to sell legally, a Captain Dudley Bradstreet rigged up a lead cat plaque on the front of a house, with a pipe running to its paw and a slot near its mouth. Passers-by would post a coin and murmur, "Puss, do you have any gin?" — the cat would appear to answer, gin would trickle out of its paw, and the crowd never saw the person actually selling it, so the law had no one to arrest. Wooden cat plaques were already a familiar sign outside places that sold gin, and the "Puss and Mew," as it became known, is one of the reasons a black cat still turns up on Old Tom gin branding today — a piece of drinks packaging that started life as a smuggling device.
The number tequila won't let you skip
Every genuine bottle of tequila carries a small printed code — NOM, followed by four digits — and it's one of the more quietly ruthless pieces of label regulation anywhere in drinks. Tequila has been a protected Denomination of Origin since 1974, meaning it can only legally be made in and around Jalisco, and the NOM number takes that protection one step further: it identifies the exact licensed distillery that filled the bottle, whatever brand name is on the front. Because plenty of well-known tequila brands don't own a distillery at all — they contract production at an established one — the same four digits can quietly appear on dozens of different labels sitting on the same shelf. It's a rare example of a government forcing total transparency onto a label, whether the brand wants it there or not.
Ornament as the whole argument
By the time you reach tequila's modern glass-and-ceramic boom, the label has effectively taken over the entire bottle. As tequila's reputation shifted from bar-shot spirit to something sipped and collected, brands like Clase Azul started making the vessel itself the branding — hand-painted decanters with their own signature bells, drawing on Mexican Baroque ornament rather than a paper label at all. It's the same instinct that made Gordon's lean so hard into its distinctive green glass, or Old Tom gin keep a cat on the label a quarter of a millennium after the joke started: when a drink's reputation is doing a lot of the talking, the packaging stops decorating the product and starts making the argument for it.
Turn it round
Next time you're stood in front of a drinks shelf, it's worth picking a bottle up and turning it round. The small print often tells you more than the front does: who actually made it, where, and whether the name on the label owns a distillery at all. When we drew our gin and tequila cards, every bottle got its own label and its own shape, partly because they really are all different and partly because it's a lot more fun to draw that way.
