where a bottle learns to speak.
First, the old voice:
a 19th-century engraving,
wind-worn, ink-deep,
carrying the patience of hands
that knew time by candlelight.
Then the new voice arrives
not asking permission,
but bringing geometry
as a clean argument.
Letters grow large enough
to become architecture,
stretching across the width
like a bridge between centuries.
The problem was never “style.”
It was coexistence.
How to make history and now
share the same breath
without one swallowing the other.
How to wrap the story around glass
so the eye keeps turning
and never drops the thread.
So we built a dialogue.
Engraving as memory,
typography as declaration.
And between them, copper blocks,
metallic, warm, almost tactile,
cutting rhythm into the cool blue field
like percussion in a quiet song.
Not decoration,
but weight,
a sculptural punctuation
that makes the surface feel
less like paper
and more like object.
Working with Ruska Martin Associates,
we tuned the balance
until it behaved:
tradition intact,
modernity unmistakable.
A premium feel,
not by shouting,
but by standing upright.
On the shelf,
it doesn’t beg to be seen.
It simply happens.
A flash of copper,
a disciplined blue,
a historical face holding its ground
while bold type moves forward
as if the future had always been there,
waiting for the right spacing.
The reception was a nod
from both worlds.
Impact without cheap drama.
Heritage without dust.
A regional story
told with contemporary grammar.
And still, every system whispers
what it could become next.
More varieties,
the same spine,
different inflections.
Foil tones shifting like light
on a cathedral floor
from gold to rose to smoke.
Perhaps more narrative,
not to explain the engraving,
but to let it speak again,
to pull another thread from the past
and weave it into the present
without breaking the weave.
Because a label is never only a label.
It is a theorem you can hold.
A proof wrapped around glass:
that old and new
can share a surface
and both remain true.