Project: Cain Vineyard & Winery: A Website Reimagined
Client: Cain Vineyard & Winery
Creative Talent:
Project Director for Cain: Christopher Howell, Winemaker & General Manager
Cain Vineyard & Winery logo and packaging design: Chuck House
Website Design: Theresa Whitehill, Colored Horse Studios
Art Direction: Colored Horse Studios
Photography: Olaf Beckmann
The Story:
Visiting Cain Vineyard & Winery for the first time in November of 2008, the setting on top of Spring Mountain lodged in me the way a person would. The open-ended valley comes down off the ridge and holds everything while at the same time displaying the view beyond. From one vantage point, sitting in a 4-wheel drive truck at an odd angle, we could see, through binoculars, snow on the Sierras, and in the other direction, looking west, the Pacific. We were up above the fogline of the Napa Valley and could look down onto it with a view normally seen in an airplane. When it is cold in the valley it is sometimes temperate, even mild at Cain, even in winter. And oftentimes in the late summer or early fall when the valley has hardly any air to share and everything is settled in dusty heat, the temperature will be almost ten or fifteen degrees cooler, so I learned to dress in layers and bring something winterish warm.
When Christopher Howell asked for our help redesigning the Cain website, he suggested using Olaf Beckmann’s images as a guide, and the site design grew around a series of triptychs, quads, and solitary perspectives that he shot over the course of several years. The triptychs and quads became a comfortable grid on which to build the pages. The opening page features his solitary image of the Welcoming Tree, a graceful oak growing near the barn that remains from the days of sheep ranching. The simplicity relies on framing the typography of Chuck House, designer of the labels and Cain logotype, allowing enough white space for the few elements to speak. It’s still a page I am not tired of looking at.
And then there’s the wine…
Special Features: The static site was designed to integrate with dynamic store and allocation pages. The initial site, launched in 2009, will be expanded to include the capability to view images larger. With the film shot from Beckmann’s 8x10 format camera, landscapes and intimate corners of the property all benefit from enlarging, as the details continue to unfold, resolve, and invite a closer inspection from the viewer. In this the photographs behave in a three-dimensional way.
Target Resolution: 1024 x 768
Typefaces: Serlio (navigation), Garamond (HTML text)
Date: Launched March 1, 2009
Cain Website copyright ©2009 Cain Vineyard & Winery, All Rights Reserved
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