The Surprising Centralas Brand Revelation

While driving back to South Central Los Angeles after Centralas's first harvest, we passed a large billboard advertising a wine brand. This inspired us to ask the question: What would the Centralas billboard look like?

Since we live in Tinseltown USA our native tongue is movies & TV. So what we really started discussing was: What would the Centralas movie poster look like?

What we came up with surprised me.

We decided that the Centralas poster would be something like Love Actually. Yes, Richard Curtis is pretty much on-brand for Centralas.

You see, we've founded Centralas on two key values: organic viticulture and transparent winemaking. We only use grapes that have been farmed organically or biodynamically, and we will list every ingredient on the bottle. That way you know exactly what you are, and are not, drinking.

We could approach these values from very different perspectives, though.

There is a perspective that is easy to take: it's a bad and scary wine-world out there for the most part, especially when it comes to chemicals and practices that are used in "conventional" viticulture and ingredients that are added to wines without telling consumers. We can give you examples. Lots of examples. And Centralas is the cure.

That's one model: create fear and anxiety, and propose your brand as the panacea.

But this perspective focuses inherently on the negative. It's simultaneously combative and defensive. It is intended to enhance the fear and anxiety in your life.

That's not the brand we want for Centralas.

We want to inspire you.

We want you to fall in love, to feel joy, to appreciate what is good and courageous and artistic, to have a laugh. And to have hope. We want you to embrace the rich diversity of life in all its natural colors and flavors.

That's at the heart of the values that inspired Centralas.

We don't hate bad wines, we love good ones. And we love the brave, intelligent farmers and winemakers who are investing their lives to craft wines inspired by the Centralas values.

And we want those who don't share the Centralas values to see what a fun, prosperous, meaningful time we're having and want to join. We don't want to have a corner on the market of our values. We want to inspire more and more vineyards to be farmed and wines to be made with these values.

This is a harder proposition. We humans often scare easily and love slowly. The pull of the dark side is appealing.

But the harder work of inspiring hope is the only work we want to do. It's the only world we want to create.

Love (and hope and joy and bravery and beauty), actually, is all around us, if we just know where to look. The mission of Centralas is to help point it out.