HIRSCH VINEYARDS
A Pinot Dynasty Finds Its Voice
THE VINEYARD IN A FOREST
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THE VINEYARD IN A FOREST •
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Hirsch Vineyards is a critically acclaimed vineyard perched on a seaside mountaintop on the Sonoma coast. The family of winemakers has a long history of creating award-winning, biodynamic pinot noir.
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Gen X and Boomer wine collectors. Wealthy, educated, and primarily male.
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Define, systemize, and update the winemaker’s brand identity and voice to appeal to a new generation of wine drinkers.
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Leverage the winery’s rich history, stellar reputation, and biodynamic farming practices to develop a brand identity and marketing materials that speak to rugged refinement, family tradition, and the millennial appetite for nostalgia.
Apparel & Collateral\ Designing the Future of an Iconic Brand
By the time Jasmine Hirsch reached out to The Grass Agency in 2020, her family had been making award-winning pinots on the Sonoma Coast for over forty years. She was looking for help creating a series of custom greeting cards. Since then, we’ve produced illustrations, marketing collateral, ads, apparel, stationary, and a brand book that codified and redefined the voice and visual language of this mystical vineyard in a forest.
Jasmine Hirsch, the CEO and daughter of founder David Hirsch, had recently taken over the family business and was looking to update the brand’s visual identity while paying respect to its rich heritage. Using original label illustrations, based on mythology and biodynamic farming, and the winery's terroir as source material, we created a series of greeting cards, t-shirts, and totes that are bold but refined, much like the estate’s signature wines. Since then, we’ve refreshed all of the brand’s tasting room materials and stationery, and created promotional graphics for its new releases.
From the time of its inception, Jasmine’s step mother, Marie Hirsch, acted as the vineyard’s creative director. She devised a bold visual language with hand drawn illustrations and watercolor paintings that reflect the brand’s farming practices and reverence for old world winemaking. While Marie created a strong identity, Hirsch lacked a cohesive brand system and relied on dated, often distorted, files for its labels and marketing materials.
The Brand Book\ An Authentic Identity Built for Scale
In 2024 we set out to codify and refine the vineyard’s identity and bring it into alignment with its reputation as one of the world’s most exacting makers of pinot noir. We spent four weeks digging into customer data, interviewing key stakeholders, and exploring a vast visual archive. What we found was a heritage brand steeped in tradition looking to connect with the future of wine consumers, in this case millennial men.
So, after one month of in-depth discovery, we crafted a brand identity steeped in rugged refinement that referenced the family’s tradition of developing complex biodynamic wines from a stunning vineyard perched on the cliffs of the Sonoma Coast. The brand’s voice and visual language would draw on American nostalgia, the natural mysticism of the California coast, and the family’s deep appreciation for the land.
The resulting brand book included logos, fonts, secondary graphics, and color usage guidelines for print, web, and social; illustration and photography styles; brand values, voice and personality; and applications of the brand in use. We also digitized and archived the vineyard’s digital assets and created workflows for social media to streamline the posting process.
That project laid the groundwork for a major site redesign, and led to immediate engagement and audience gains on social media.
