Intrepid OCD wine honcho braves third-world country

In a bold and dangerous move, characteristic of her fierce helmsmanship of OCD, Melissa Saunders finds herself this week in one of the worlds most blood-thirsty banana republics: New Zealand. Packing her trusty side kick, Mr. Machete, Melissa arrived two days ago to inspect our vineyards, oversee the bottling process and gamble on underground Koala bear fights. Vicious stuff!


Upon landing it was straight to the bottling plant to deal with a sitch. A serious sitch for which blame can be spread in an even schmear across several departments and subcontractors here at Communal Brands. Unfortunately the contrast between the the name of the wine and the label color was not enough to make it pop and thus created a serious legibility issue. Take a look for yourself:



This is all a bit more complicated than it sounds, for all of you who are saying, "string up the idiot who picked red on red!" Well, that could be true and an occasional stringing up is excellent for morale as we all know, but there are some mitigating factors that should be considered. All of the files were approved for print via email, and this allowed computer monitors to show the colors as they are calibrated - never an honest color portrayal. But we knew this much, what we didn't know was that when using a matte finish on our estate style labels, the colors tend to bleed or "blend" together a bit more than on glossier labels. We know now this, but that doesn't mean that printing 50,000 replacement labels is no big deal. It's a big deal. Hell, let's string someone up. Who wants to volunteer? Anyone? How 'bout a free OCD tee shirt and you've only got to be strung up for 3 days. The x-factor that is not being mentioned here because it may be too complicated to tackle right now is that we, the OCD kids, were toying with the wine's name right up to days prior to printing (I'll address this issue later) and there were several other timing issues that put an immense amount of pressure on DECIDING AND APPROVING RIGHT NOW!!!!!! I guarantee you we will not be in this position again.

After the stress of being in a third world country and dealing with a printing screw-up with bottling mere hours away, Melissa needed to wind down a little bit. She headed to her hotel and picked up her room key using this country's quaint cubby-hole key security system. The idea works like this: the key has a name indicated on the outside of the drawer. You must then figure out which room it belongs to. This way, if you lose your key, noone will know which door it opens. Kind of brilliant really. Here's the cubby-master, as it's called, at the hotel Melissa is staying at:



For those interested, Melissa has the "Influenza Powder" key which matched up to the "Eloper's Suite". Exciting stuff down there in New Zealand! Such an interesting land and peoples about which we here at Otto's Current Discussion, hope to reveal more of it's bizarre secrets as we continue on this journey.

That's all for today - I'm as buggered form writing about this as Melissa was from experiencing it. Hopefully she'll chirp a little about her Vineyard tour. I'm personally looking forward to it.

THM aka PK aka TC aka FRTC aka Chris