Wine photography comes with a fairly established visual language.
Bottles. Glassware. Vineyards. Cellars. Beautiful tables.
But what happens when the wine itself is designed to leave all of that behind?
Spier’s canned wine range was created for a different kind of occasion. Something you can take to a picnic, a festival, a braai or simply outside into the garden. No corkscrew. No glass bottle. Much less ceremony. Spier
And that gave us permission to approach the photography differently too.
Taking wine out of the wine world
Rather than treating the cans like smaller versions of traditional wine bottles, we wanted the imagery to embrace what makes them different.
Portable. Colourful. Informal. Social.
The product still needed to be clearly recognisable, but it also needed to feel completely at home in the moments it was made for.
That meant moving between more graphic product photography and looser lifestyle images — hands reaching into frame, cans being passed around, people moving, drinking and spending time together.
The trick with photographs like these is that they need to feel spontaneous while still being carefully constructed.
Light, colour, composition and product placement all matter.
You just don’t necessarily want the viewer thinking about any of them.
“WHEN A PRODUCT BREAKS THE CONVENTIONS OF ITS CATEGORY, THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOULD PROBABLY BREAK SOME OF THEM TOO.”
A different expression of wine
The cans themselves also gave us something unusual to work with visually.
Spier’s range uses artworks from South African artists across the packaging, turning something normally quite functional into a bold part of the image. Spier
So rather than trying to make canned wine behave like traditional wine, the photography could lean into its own personality.
More relaxed. More immediate. A little less precious.
Because sometimes changing how people see a product starts with showing them a different way of experiencing it.
Project information
Client — Spier Wine Farm
Agency — The Friday Street Club
Project — Canned Wine
Photography — Charles Russell
Production — Visigrafi Studio
Location — Stellenbosch, South Africa