BarreXat de la Terreta

BARREXAT DE LA TERRETA

ABOUT

Barrejat — “mixture” in Valencian — is an old bar drink from Valencia: half cazalla aniseed spirit, half mistela fortified wine. Farmhands drank it at dawn before heading out to the orange groves, to take the cold off. It had never been bottled: it was mixed at the counter, one glass at a time. The brief was to turn that bar ritual into a shelf product without domesticating it.

SOLUTION

The starting point was the date. The drink became popular around 1900, at the height of Valencian modernisme, and that is where the visual answer was: the Mosaic Hall of Valencia’s Estación del Norte railway station, with its tilework, its mosaics and its trencadís, the technique of rebuilding a whole surface out of broken fragments. Here trencadís works not as decoration but as a definition of the product: two separate spirits that only exist once they are joined. The decision the whole project rests on is that the mosaic is not printed, it is raised. Every tessera is built in screen-printed braille varnish, a high-build varnish that adds real volume and a three-dimensional gloss over the matt surface of the label. Light catches each fragment separately, so the pattern shifts as the bottle is turned. The bottle itself is a stock model: all the work is concentrated in the paper and the finish.

RESULT

The mosaic is not read, it is traced with a fingertip. A drink that used to be ordered only by word of mouth now has a recognisable shelf presence, and a bottle that explains where it comes from without spelling it out.