Distinctive Wine Label Design, Printed to Last: The Staro Oryahovo Selection Series
A Label You Notice From Across the Room
Some wines need an introduction. Staro Oryahovo isn’t one of them.
In Bulgaria, their whites and rosés have built a following the slow, honest way — by being very good, year after year. No marketing fireworks. Just consistency that turns first-time buyers into loyal ones. So when a winery like this decides to step up a tier, the brief carries real weight: the new design can’t betray the trust the old one earned. It has to stand beside everything that came before and then go further.
The Selection series is that “further.” A sparkling wine made in the Crémant method and a white blend with a clear sense of origin. The Labelmaker designed the identity. And at Dagaprint, we were tasked with turning that design into something you can read from across a room and then keep discovering with every step closer.
This is how it came together on our presses.
The Design We Were Handed (and Why It Was a Gift to Print)
The Labelmaker built the whole identity from a single idea: a logo where the letter S sits inside the letter O as negative space — two forms that intersect, overlap and complete each other. You see the O. You see the S. You sense both at once, without effort.
From that one mark came the entire label structure: two halves, white above and near-black silver below, held together at the centre by the logo itself. Harmony of opposites, made visible.
A concept that clean is a pleasure to produce — because every print decision has a reason behind it. Here’s what those decisions became.
1. A Semi-Matte Silver That Exists Nowhere Else
The lower half of the label is a very dark, near-black silver — and it is not a colour you’ll find in any catalogue. We developed it at Dagaprint specifically for this project, mixed to a formula that exists only here.
What makes it special is how it refuses to sit still. Under direct light it carries a deep metallic shimmer. Under ambient light it reads almost as a soft dark grey. In candlelight, on a restaurant table, it does something else entirely. A custom-matched colour like this is one of the quiet luxuries of bespoke wine label printing — the kind of detail that makes a bottle feel like it belongs to one brand and no other.
2. Gold Foil With Restraint
The essential text — Selection, Brut Bio, and the winery emblem — is carried in gold foil with fine relief. Warm, not flashy. Present, but never loud.
That restraint is deliberate. Gold foil at the premium tier should confirm quality, not shout about it. The relief gives the lettering just enough physical presence to catch the eye, while the warmth of the tone keeps it elegant. It does exactly what good foil should do — and stops precisely where it should.
3. The Wave Motif, Felt Before It's Seen
Staro Oryahovo’s design language has always carried a wave motif, and The Labelmaker wanted it to continue here — as a thread of continuity connecting the Selection series to everything the winery has built before.
We produced those waves in a transparent semi-matte relief varnish, applied across both halves of the label. On the silk-matte surface, they register as texture before they read as ornament. Touch before sight. It’s the kind of finish a customer feels in the hand without ever consciously noticing — and that’s exactly the point of high-end finishing.
4. A Closure That Argues for Less
Here’s a detail we love about this project: the sparkling wine has no capsule at all.
It was a deliberate choice made early and the right one. A traditional gold muselet and cap is already one of the most elegant closures in wine. Adding a capsule over it would only add weight, both literal and carbon, to packaging that didn’t need it. Leaving it off is eco-conscious wine packaging done quietly and confidently, not as a marketing badge.
The white blend takes a different route: a new Stelvin screw cap, finished in the same dark metallic silver as the lower half of the label. The continuity is intentional. From closure to base, the bottle reads as one composed object the kind of top-to-bottom coherence that’s rarer in wine packaging than it should be, and immediately felt even by people who can’t explain why.
5. Why Distinctive Design Is a Commercial Argument
Most wine labels only work up close. You have to be standing in front of them to read them and by then, a choice has usually already been made.
The Staro Oryahovo Selection label works from further away. The two-tone structure, the proportions of the logo, the contrast between luminous white and near-black silver — these register as a shape and a presence before they register as text. That’s distinctive wine label design in the most literal sense: the bottle is distinct before it’s legible.
And then the discovery begins. The closer you get, the more there is to find — the wave relief, the shifting silver, the precision of the gold foil, and finally the quiet question the logo poses: S and O, full and empty, two things that are also one. By the time the bottle is in your hand, the design has already done its work. The wine answers the question the label asked.
For a winery that already knows exactly who it is, that’s the right kind of statement to make and the right kind of label to print.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you’re planning a premium release, a rebrand, or a label that needs to work from across the room, our team would love to talk it through.
Printer: Dagaprint
Client: Staro Oryahovo Winery
Embellishments: doming, volume varnish, custom die cut
Wine Label Designer: The Labelmaker
Photos: The Labelmaker