A winery that doesn’t filter its wine. A brand that says nothing the land didn’t say first. A system that adds nothing it can’t take out. The shop is the visible part — this case goes from the vineyard to what keeps the site alive three weeks later.
Nothing that doesn’t come from the grape.
Nothing the land didn’t say first.
Nothing goes in that can’t come out.
Where it started
A wine made right, dressed as every other wine in Ribera. Before changing anything, I went to listen.
The winery had a site and a label already. Black pages, gold capitals, a diamond for a logo, the wooden case, a stock-cellar mood — and the line «Hacemos vinos auténticos» at the bottom of every page. Everything a Ribera del Duero estate says. Nothing this one does. A natural wine, unfiltered, with no added sulphites, was being sold in the costume of the wines it was made against.
The word every label in the region uses.
Luxury borrowed from someone else’s shelf.
The one thing no other winery around could say.
The first deliverable wasn’t a sketch. I went to the village where the vines grow and talked to the people who have always worked them — and recorded it. Not to quote them on a label: to understand what the land means to the ones who never had to explain it.
Everything after this chapter — the positioning, the name on the bottle, the words on the site — comes from those recordings, not from a moodboard.
Natural wine is drunk young and talked about old. The strategy put Junciera Jiné where few wineries stand: the craft and price of a wine made by hand on old plots, for someone who opens it on a Thursday — not in a cellar, not with a speech.
The brand
A name, a mark, a colour, a bottle, a voice, fifty-four drawings. All of it before a single page of the site.
Before drawing a letter, I went after the name. Each word turned out to be an object — so the brand was built from the objects, not from adjectives.
A clay vessel with a pierced lid, where aromatic herbs were left to scent a room.
…que quando llego á casa, y me le quito,
sanea el aposento donde habito,
y arrimado á un rincón, ó adonde quiera,
me sirve de perfume y de junciera.Francisco Gregorio de Salas · Poesías, vol. I · 1797
A wine that perfumes the room it is opened in, kept at home, in a corner. That gave the brand its two words: humble and homely — «vinos humildes, vinos hogareños».
The study sets it next to the oldest building there is: two stones standing, one laid across.
«No se añaden sulfitos, ni tartárico ni láctico, sin levaduras comerciales o bacterias lácticas, sin filtrar, sin estabilizar con frío… Un vino alejado del exceso de maquillaje habitual en la zona.»
No added sulphites, no tartaric or lactic acid, no commercial yeasts or lactic bacteria, unfiltered, not cold-stabilised… A wine far from the heavy make-up usual in the region.
The wordmark was tested in capitals and lower case, in four serifs, on the colours of the land: the dark green of the holm oaks, the ochre of the stubble, the bone of the limestone. Capitals read as a château. Lower case read as a house. The house won.
JJ.
The stones of chapter 04, drawn as letters: two J’s standing side by side, their tops joined in one stroke — the slab across them. The oldest way of building something that lasts, without mortar: nothing added.
Each wine was photographed with what grows around its plots, and its palette was taken from that photograph: the wall, the quince, the cherry, the wax, the walnut, the bark, the glass. The colours are the objects.
wallquincecherrywaxwalnutbarkglassAnd the land as one ramp of greens, from the new shoot to the holm oak.
The product photography has one idea. Above the bottle, what the wine smells of. Below it, what it tastes of. The bottle is the balance. Every object on the table — wild apple, plum, blackberry, walnut, hazelnut, thyme, a dried poppy, bark — was picked around the plots and stands for a note in that wine.
Smells ofTastes ofThe iconography in chapter 11 draws the same notes the still life builds: red fruit, stone fruit, thyme, nuts. One tasting note, three languages — the glass, the photo, the icon.
Every bottle in Ribera wears a paper label over the glass. The new one takes it off: nothing covers the wine, so you see it through the light — raw, nothing hidden, the wine speaking for itself. What stays is the brand, and it goes up a level: the JJ isotype I drew for them, the logotype under it, the year low on the glass. The red wax stays — it was always theirs.
The other half of the photography is the field, and here the rule flips: nothing is arranged. The plots and the cellar, the people who work them, while they work.
All the narrative of the brand is mine: the site, the pages, the lines under every photo. Three rules held it together. No capitals anywhere — not even the headline. Short sentences, the length of something said in a field. And the vine as the subject: the family never boasts, the land does the talking.
A light serif, large and tight.
SangBleu Sunrise Light and Light Italic — the client’s licence. Shown here only inside images.A neutral grotesk, small and calm.
Helvetica Neue for reading, the labels of the data sheets and the navigation.Mouthfeel, aromas, how it’s made, pairings, service and the tasting phases — eight families drawn as one: a 48 × 48 grid, a 1.6 stroke, round caps. The «nothing added» marks share one gesture: the thing, crossed out. Two styles over the same drawings. It ships as a library the winery uses on its own — boxes, decks, flyers — so it’s shown here the way a product team would hand it over: browse, inspect, export.
Mock-ups of use · the set is handed over as files for the winery to place on its own boxes, decks and flyers.
The library didn’t enter the site as a new component. It entered as one attribute on an existing block: every line of a data sheet can now carry an icon, chosen from a list in the editor. Empty means no icon. The system grew by a field, not by a page.
The web
The last thing made — and the one that has to keep changing when I’m not there.
A natural-wine winery in Peñaranda de Duero, seven old plots above 800 metres. They wanted to sell online. Two people use that shop and they want opposite things.
Buys wine at night, on a phone, on bad coverage. Wants to see the bottle and be done.
No PHP, and afraid to touch anything in case the site breaks. Wants to change a photo in October without calling anyone.
Build for the first and the second one stops using it. Build for the second and the first one leaves. Most shops pick one and call it a decision.
Each page of the site is built from the system’s blocks, laid out like a winegrower’s field notebook: a photo to the edge, a huge split headline, a 12-column grid that breaks on purpose with offset images, and the plates as the data layer. No new colours, no new fonts — the site’s own tokens.
The site already opens with one. A second logo screen was cut.
Headline, eyebrows and data-sheet names stay in lower case.
Like the home mosaic. No staggered collage.
The terroir is told as a naturalist would: three scientific plates in a single fine line, each carrying a number the winery can defend. Where the vines are, how high, and for how long.
0.3 to 1.1 stroke, labels in the brand’s italic serif, a fine frame with cartographic tick marks.
18 KB, 19 KB and 36 KB gzipped. Drawn in the brand colour so they change with it.
Every improvement is paid N times and drifts. Six months in there’s no system: there are six different websites.
It hands control back and takes performance and coherence with it. The client doesn’t want to build pages. They want to sell wine.
Analytics, CRM and cart recovery from third parties. Cheaper on day one — and it puts the client’s customer list, consent record and recovery email inside somebody else’s product.
It forces the split between system and brand up front, and it builds the pipe before there is anyone to send anything through.
Grid, type, motion, the shop, the filters, the settings panel. 148 design tokens and 25 editor blocks. It doesn’t know any client’s name.
Data, consent, CRM, measurement, cart recovery, A/B. It lives apart from the theme because data outlives a redesign.
Its type, its colours, its own 8 blocks · counted 2026-10-30. Thirteen source colours; every other tone is calculated from those.
of the code is never written again for the next brand. All code; 91.2% counting PHP only.
Bars, windows and blocks, with their own panel and five test suites.
Including the one that records why the cart was abandoned — not only that it was.
With preview and the legal side built in, so consent lives next to the email it allows.
Series, taxonomy, pulse, running totals and events sent from the server, not only the browser.
Each one only what it has contracted. Revoking takes effect at once.
A client won’t update if they don’t know what they gain: “the sales summary doesn’t slow down even with thousands of orders”.
Read from outside, without logging into any of them.
The glass
What it gave back, and what I’d do differently.
Two of those six third-party requests were returning errors. 24 MB of the package were test photos that had no business shipping.
The mobile 75 is dominated by the server — 1.16 s of waiting — not the theme. Said here, not hidden.
From the first recording in the village to a site the winery changes by itself.
Strategy, research, identity, labels, photography direction, iconography, every line of copy, the shop and the system under it.
Edge caching gets left to the end and moves the needle most: 1.16 s of waiting weighs more than 500 KB of CSS. Measure it on day one.
Name every folder after the thing it deploys, from minute zero. Fixing it later meant moving 532 files.
Client photos don’t live in the theme. 24 MB of test material got into the folder that ships, and took two weeks to leave.
