Premium Wine Label Printing in Action: How Dagaprint Produced the Zitara Rebrand for Four Friends Winery
When a Wine Outgrows Its Label, Print Has to Rise With It
Every so often a wine project lands on our press floor that reminds us why we do this. The Zitara series by Four Friends Winery — the flagship premium range led by chief winemaker Petar Iliev — was one of them. The wines had matured. The audience had grown. The recognition was real. Only the label had stayed behind, still dressed for a smaller ambition.
When the Labelmaker brought the redesigned artwork to Dagaprint, the brief to us was clear: match the new identity with print production that could carry it — gram for gram, foil for foil, emboss for emboss. Not a refresh. A complete premium wine label built from the paper up.
This is the story of how that label, capsule and finish came to life on our presses in Bulgaria — and what it takes to produce luxury wine packaging in Europe at this level.
The Design Brief We Received From the Labelmaker
Before a single plate was made, the design intent was set. The Labelmaker delivered an identity built on a quiet but powerful idea: a logo shaped like a square table seen from above, with four half-arc chairs around it — the four founders of the winery, gathered at the moment the brand began. A new slogan, “Four Friends – One Winery,” anchored it. A custom cut of the Aureus typeface, developed with Vassil Kateliev for The Fontmaker Type Foundry, made its debut on the Zitara wordmark.
Our job at Dagaprint was to translate that conceptual precision into physical print, without losing a single nuance.
1. The Paper and the Hidden Debossed Arc
The label structure is classical in proportion, with one deliberate disruption: an asymmetric arc running from lower left to upper right. The Labelmaker wanted that same arc echoed in the background of the label — not in ink, but in the paper itself.
To achieve it, our production team applied a special emulsion to the arc area, rendering that zone marginally smoother and more even than the surrounding structured paper. The result is a contrast you don’t see so much as feel: two textures coexisting in a single material plane. It’s the kind of detail most consumers will never name consciously — and that is exactly the point of high-end wine label printing. Craft that registers below the threshold of attention is what separates premium from ordinary.
2. Gold Hot Foil Stamping and Roof Embossing on the Logotype
At the centre of the label sits the Four Friends logotype, executed in rich gold hot foil stamping and finished with roof embossing: a technique we’ve refined across multiple premium wine projects to give complex graphic forms genuine three-dimensional volume.
Roof embossing is unforgiving. The relief has to peak cleanly without cracking the foil, and the registration with the foil layer has to be exact to the tenth of a millimetre. On the Zitara label, the form catches light sculpturally from any angle, a quiet flex of print engineering that turns the logo from a mark into an object.
Below it, the Zitara wordmark in custom Aureus type is finished with a tactile spot varnish. Held under raking light, the letters seem to lift off the paper. The label feels assembled from multiple materials. It is, in fact, a single surface produced in one coordinated production pass.
3. The Capsule: Matte Black, Smoked Silver, Deep Roof Emboss
The most considered element on the bottle is one most people don’t think twice about: the screw cap. The Labelmaker specified — and we produced — what is genuinely one of the most refined custom wine capsules to leave our facility.
- Body: matte black, deep and even.
- Frieze: a solid band of smoked silver running around the lower section, carrying the “Four Friends – One Winery” slogan in the same typographic logic as the label.
- Top disk: the Four Friends logo in smoked silver with deep roof embossing — the strongest relief on the entire bottle.
The smoked silver itself is a custom-matched colour — warm, complex, somewhere between metallic and matte. It took a long sequence of simulations and rejected proofs to land on a tone that doesn’t look like a stock catalogue silver. It looks like it belongs to Zitara specifically. That’s what bespoke capsule production should deliver.
4. Built for the PPWR Era: Premium Meets Compliant
As Europe moves toward the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), premium wine producers are asking a sharper question: how do we keep luxury aesthetics while meeting tighter sustainability standards?
It’s a frontier we’re actively engineering for. The Zitara production runs use materials and finishing techniques selected with PPWR-compliant wine packaging in mind — proof that recyclability and refined craft are no longer mutually exclusive. For wineries planning their next vintage, this is the conversation to be having now, not in 2030.
5. A Label System Built to Scale
The Zitara range will grow. New varieties will join the line, each wearing the same label architecture, accumulating recognition vintage by vintage. The system has already proved its versatility through the Zitara Crémant project, where the core identity was adapted for the higher-pressure demands of premium sparkling wine packaging: a different bottle shape, a different capsule format, the same standard of execution.
That repeatability same form, same logic, same quality, run after run — is what wineries should expect from a serious print partner. A wine brand identity is only as strong as the production line behind it.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Ready to Print a Wine Label Worth a Second Look?
If you’re planning a premium wine label, a rebrand, or a new release that needs production craft to match the ambition behind it, our team would be glad to talk it through.
Printer: Dagaprint
Client: Four Friends Winery
Embellishments: hot foil, roof embossing, deep debossing, volume varnish
Wine Label Designer: The Labelmaker
Photos: The Labelmaker