Domaine Les Tuileries — Hand-Drawn Wine Label Design for the US Market

From Gard to the United States

A local French wine identity designed for an international market

Domaine de Coursac is based in Carnas in the Gard, within the wider wine landscape between the Cévennes and the Pic Saint-Loup area. For the Domaine Les Tuileries range, the brief had an international dimension from the start: the wines were being developed for the American market.

That created an interesting visual question. The labels needed to communicate something recognisably French without becoming generic “French wine” packaging. The identity had to feel rooted in place, but also immediate and memorable to someone encountering the bottle thousands of kilometres away.

The solution was not to hide the French character, but to give it an authored voice through drawing, humour and lettering.

01 · The Concept

A French wine label, knowingly French

The name Les Tuileries suggested rooftops and tiles, so I developed a scene around two birds sharing a bottle on a tiled roof: a sociable rooster in a beret and striped shirt, his smaller companion, wine glasses, a baguette and a round of cheese.

The ingredients are deliberately familiar, but the intention was not postcard France. I was interested in something closer to the gently observed visual comedy of older French cinema — where posture, props and small social rituals carry the humour.

The label needed charm without becoming novelty packaging: recognisably French, but still credible as a wine brand.

03 · The Range

One identity across three IGP Cévennes wines

The same core illustration and hand-drawn identity were adapted across three wines, with colour used as a quiet differentiator rather than allowing each bottle to become a separate design.

Metallic gold foil was added to the varietal names and selected details in the produced labels, giving the bottles a material accent while keeping the illustration itself light and graphic.

04 · Packaging in Practice

From ink drawing to produced bottle

A wine label ultimately has to survive contact with the bottle. The logo must remain legible, the linework must hold at label scale, the characters must still read clearly and the print finish has to support rather than overwhelm the drawing.

For Domaine Les Tuileries, the finished labels retained the looseness of the original pen work while functioning as a practical three-wine packaging system.

Wine, Place & Illustration

Two wine-label projects, two very different visual languages

Domaine Les Tuileries is one example of how illustration can give a wine its own voice: humorous, character-led and intentionally French, developed for an international audience.

A very different approach can be seen in my work for Roc de Couder for Mas de Figuier in the Pic Saint-Loup — a French-language project rooted directly in the local wine landscape.

Project Details

Domaine Les Tuileries