220 S. Wabash Ave. Chicago, IL 60604
(312) 431-9588

Wine Country Tour Memorabilia Shadowbox

Our shop manager, Dana, was given a project by a client who had gone on a tour of the California wine country with a friend. Our client wanted to have her create something special in the way of a memorabilia shadowbox employing wine labels that the client had brought back from the numerous wineries that she and a friend had stopped at along the way. A lot of the wine labels had been removed from the bottles and were not all in the best of shape after being soaked in water to remove them. Nonetheless, Dana devised a great way to show them, mounting many of them on small mat board platforms that mimicked the shapes of the labels. These were, basically, the fallouts from custom designed mat openings that she created on our Wizard computerized mat cutter.

The overall size of the shadowbox is 27 x 15, made from Gemini 3800 moulding, which is a coffee-colored deep cap-style shadowbox moulding. The drop-in shadowbox that she created is Bainbridge 4841 Bamboo silk mat board. Glass used is Tru-Vue AR anti-reflective glass, which allows you to see everything clearly without any glare or reflection. A number of the elements have been mounted on the shadowbox base with small foam board risers to give them the appearance of floating in place.

Hopefully, our client's trip through the wine country ended up happier than the one that Paul Giamatti did in the movie Sideways. If you have never taken a tour of a winery, I highly recommend it. Our son Nicholas, who did his undergrad and masters degrees in horticulture at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa, took us down to Oskaloosa (a small town south and east of Des Moines, about an hour out of Ames) one summer while doing an internship at ISU. His room mate, Jack, was working as an intern at the Tassel Ridge Winery and got us a tour of the winery, along with a trip to some new vineyards they were planting and a private tour of the harvesting equipment by the winery owner, Bob Wersen, CSW. We got to taste a raft of different wines that they produce there and bought a few cases to take home. It was a lot of fun, very relaxing and a terrific day trip. If you live in Michigan, upstate New York, Washington State, Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota, and, of course, California, there are plenty of vineyards to visit and wineries to tour. If you do go, bring back lots of wine labels and viticulture ephemera from which we may design something very tasty for your wall!

Framing designed and executed by Dana L. Fisher, MCPF
Photo credits: Brian Flax
Images by kind permission of S. Ludwig

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Wine Country Tour Memorabilia Shadowbox

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