Philosophy of artisanal winemaking

Bodega Luis Saavedra is a family winery in Cenicientos, Madrid — ecological wines from centennial garnacha vines in Gredos granite. The project started from an unusual place: the Saavedra family had already done significant work framing their artisanal craft around a single idea. Their wine is the product of time — not as an abstraction, but as something lived, cyclical, and sacred. 

They called it Tempus Sacrum, where peasant culture meets the many meanings of time: seasonal, liturgical, atmospheric. The positioning, the narrative, the story of each wine — all of it was defined. The challenge was translating it into a visual language.

MY ROLE

Conceptualization and creative direction. Development of the visual narrative from the client's brand strategy. Design and supervision of printing production and materials.

Before clocks and calendars, time meant something different. Greek philosophy distinguished between two complementary forms of time. Chronos — measured, ordered, cyclical, implacable. The passing of seasons, the routine of the vineyard. Kairos — the right moment, the opportunity that changes everything. The exact instant of harvest, the first taste.

Winemaking lives in both. Months of patient pruning, waiting, watching the grapes mature — but it's your gut that tells you when to harvest, that brief window before the magic is gone.

This duality between order and intuition, rationality and emotion, became the conceptual framework for the visual direction.

Chronos is structure. The vertical lines of centennial vines rooted in granite, the rows of a plowed field, the grain of a cork. Patterns that repeat, season after season, generation after generation. Kairos is the sky. Every morning you wake up and the sky puts on an ephemeral spectacle of color that lasts only a few minutes. Unrepeatable, impossible to own. Sunrises and sunsets mark the cycles of rural life, signal the liturgies of the field. No two are ever the same.

The labels translate this directly. The gradients capture kairos: each wine gets its own sky, its own moment in time, from dawn gold to deep violet dusk. The vertical lines running through each gradient are chronos, varying in density according to the complexity of the wine, connecting sky and earth, the felt and the measured.

Every wine holds a story. In this podcast, nine literary tales narrate the Saavedra family history through fiction, tracing generations of peasant culture, patience, and time.

A visual language that captures the ritual and rhythm of artisanal winemaking

There's always more behind each project than fits on a page—the constraints, the iterations, the decisions that didn't make the final cut. If you're curious to go deeper, let's talk: ciao@isadecuppis.com

COMPANY & YEAR
Luis Saavedra — 2021

TEAM
Isabella De Cuppis
Mónica Meika
Luis Miguel Barral

PHOTO CREDITS
Francis Tsang

PODCAST TEXTS
Susana Fuentes Arcos