The design of the wine line “Tabia” winery

The design of the wine line, for the family winery “Tabia”.

The quiet wines from the “Tabia” winery have an intelligent chess motif reflecting the strategic nature of the game, maturity and perfect harmony of taste. Conceptually, it’s all about contrasts – white and pink wines have clear white labels, while red wines have bright black labels. Each bottle depicts a live, simplified chess piece (king, queen, rook, bishop, knight or pawn), with grotesque lines symbolizing rows of vineyards on top of the pieces. The lines are embossed with gold foil.

Design: Alexander Skurihin

Curator’s Insight

The strongest decision here is restraint in the color story. Each label uses exactly two forces, a saturated piece color against a stark ground, which keeps six distinct chess pieces from turning into a cluttered set. That simplicity is what lets the line function as a family on shelf even though every bottle is visually different.
The gold foil lines do more than add shine. Running them as diagonal or curved sweeps across the pieces breaks up what could otherwise be flat, poster like silhouettes, giving each figure a sense of terrain or motion without adding any extra imagery. It’s a clever way to reference vineyard rows without resorting to literal landscape illustration, which keeps the design feeling modern rather than pastoral. Piece selection also reinforces the wine hierarchy in a subtle way. Reds carrying the more commanding pieces against black, and lighter wines carrying more understated ones against white, lets the chess metaphor do quiet work distinguishing weight and character across the range, without needing any additional label copy to explain it.