Can you pick a wine based on the animal on the label?

If you want a good bottle of wine for a good price, choose one with an animal on the label. The one with the fish is the best bet.

Those are the findings of a recent study by Wellington-based journalist Fox Meyer, published on data visualisation website The Pudding. As Meyer told RNZ’s Emile Donovan, he was trying to choose a wine in a Dunedin supermarket years ago when a friend suggested he pick the bottle “with the coolest animal on it”.

That led Meyer to wonder if there were any patterns to animal wine labels.

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What began as Meyer going round supermarkets on his own inputting prices and animals into an Excel spreadsheet became, with some help from AI animal-recognition software and The Pudding journalist Jan Diehm, an analysis of over 1400 wines from all over the world with animals on their labels to determine which fauna were most likely to serve up the best deal: were both affordable, and well-rated by users of community-generated wine rating app Vivino.

Meyer’s study (which is fun to have a play with) looked at 14 categories of animals that appeared on at least 20 labels. Of these, bottles depicting cats, birds and particularly fish were most likely to remain well-priced as quality increased. Amphibians and reptiles were the least.

It also found that any bottle with an animal on it was more likely to be good value than one without an animal.

Back in 1998, Valli Wines founder Grant Taylor chose a lion - a big cat, one of the best bets according to Meyer’s study - for his label.

But while he’s pleased to hear his illustration is a code for quality, that wasn’t his reasoning. The lion was a nod to his Scottish family’s coat of arms. The other side of Taylor’s family is Italian, and he had used that name for his Otago winery.

“I wanted to have something solid, something that would look like it had been around for a long time but could also be around for a couple of hundred years in the future,” he says.

Still, Meyer’s conclusions are, Taylor reckons, “logical. There’s warmth in animals, and friendliness, which might explain why insects are down the bottom".

Typically, Sam Kim doesn’t look at wine labels at all. As a professional wine judge and reviewer, through his website Wine Orbit, he usually tastes blind - precisely because what’s on a label can influence us, whether we realise it or not.

“Animals don't say anything about the (quality of the) wine,” he says.

But “if it’s, say, a snake on the label it might have a slight effect on how they perceive the wine when they’re tasting it, whereas if it's a beautiful lion, cat, bird it might have a more positive effect so the unofficial score in their brain might go up a little bit".

Most Vivino users aren’t pros like Kim. They’re ordinary consumers, who look at the label while tasting.

“I’m sure it has a subliminal effect on their scoring,” says Kim. Maybe the rankings are due in part to the fact our brains are more inclined to have a positive response to a bird than a pig.

But Kim thinks this could be different for New Zealand wines with native species on the label. He points to Nelson winery Spinyback, which is named for and bears the image of our beloved native reptile, the tuatara.

“The Sauvignon Blanc, it’s excellent,” Kim says. “I rate it 4.5 stars all the time.” Vivino’s international user base, however, has given it a score of 3.8, slightly below the study’s median of 4 (Spinyback Sauvignon Blanc was not one of the wines included in the study).

Could that be partly because a non-native eye could be put off by a lizard?

“I think in the New Zealand context it probably has a good perception,” says Kim.

Taylor agrees. “Natives in New Zealand, it could be a good selling point,” he says. “I’m not sure it transfers overseas. We’ve got a local connection, but it might not work in the export market.”

Decibel Wines winemaker and director Daniel Brennan also thinks native animals appeal to Kiwis, though points out wineries still make choices about how they will be interpreted.

“You could have a pukeko looking all goofy, or one of the native owls that would be way more serious and cool.”

Every Decibel label is different, designed by local Hawkes Bay artist Rakai Karaitiana, but the Martinborough Pinot Noir depicts a woman playing a French horn (a former rock band manager, Brennan often chooses musical imagery), and riding a whale.

The whale falls into the fish category in Meyer’s study, the best pick for a wine that remains well priced while rising in quality.

When planning the label along with Karaitiana, Brennan says he was thinking about “elegance and power”.

While Brennan is - like Meyer - a US import to Aotearoa, for artist Karaitiana, “growing up in NZ knew the connotations of whale rider and things like that,” Brennan says.

He does think his label denotes quality, but more because of the execution than the animal itself.

“You could use a whale that could look more jokey and silly,” he says. “Ours is still quite elegant and serious.”

When looking at a label, he reckons, it’s important to ask “what’s the feel and the colour palette? What's the producer trying to say with the label? Is it an old, classic family thing, or playful and fun and goofy and you just want to try it out on a Wednesday night?”

And it turns out even Meyer’s study found there’s something on the label more important than the animal.

“New Zealand wines are delicious and, ultimately, a better predictor of quality than any of the animals we looked at,” it concludes. “Across all categories and variables, the only dataset that maintained its price as the quality increased was New Zealand wines.”

A reminder that while animals are significant, it’s worth looking at the whole label.