With personalised wine, one of the most obvious and distinct areas for customisation is creating a custom wine label. You can have real fun designing your own label with different words, photos titles etc, to create your very own vintage masterpiece. These days there are several different ways of creating these labels. You can either design them yourself online and get them printed professionally, then mailed to you; or you can do this and just give the company the text you want and they will style and design it for you giving you a really professional look, if your design skills are not up to scratch.

The third and perhaps the most fun way (and certainly the cheapest) is to buy special wine labels, design your own and print them at home on your own inkjet or laser printer.

The company supplying these labels will generally supply templates for you to use if you have not got your own art packages, and you can create truly lovely labels. Each one can be unique or you can create a batch the same (eg for someones birthday party).

A common event to use custom wine labels for is at weddings – if you really splash out you can even use the individual wine bottles as place holders – putting your friends and family’s names on each bottle where they are going to sit. It will certainly be a conversation starter, especially if you create some sparkly labels with photos (old ones work best) and a few choice words about the person, matching the wine!!

If you are going to do it yourself with DIY wine labels, you will need to remember to remove the old wine labels first. This is usually best done with a warm damp cloth – simply moisten the old label and it will peel off when the glue gets wet (warm water works better). If it’s is expensive wine, remember not to move it around too much or heat it up (don’t put it in a bowl of hot water – the label might come off quicker, but it might not do the wine any favours).

Some of the companies that do the personalised labels will also supply the wine. Obviously this makes the whole thing a lot more expensive, but they will provide you with a very slick finished product – all you and your guests have to do is drink it!

For the complete DIY enthusuast who doesn’t want to spend anything, simply open up your favourite word processor and create a design in there, print it out on a colour printer (you can include photos etc) and then stick it onto the bottle with glue. It might not have the finishing touches of a professional expensive label but it will give you the satisfaction of doing everything yourself and will save you a fortune.