Grandpa’s Fantasy – Blueberry Port

A Little Blueberry Wine and a Lot of Imagination

Apparently, Grandma wasn’t the only member of the family with a romantic imagination.

Grandpa’s Fantasy was our fortified blueberry dessert wine, containing 18% alcohol and sporting a label every bit as mischievous as its name.

Creating Grandpa was almost as much fun as creating the wine.

Clyde and I started with two or three characters from old-fashioned comic strips. We traced and combined portions of the illustrations, altered features, and gradually assembled the character who would become Grandpa.

I drew his clothing myself, giving him a wardrobe appropriate for a slightly disreputable old gentleman with romance on his mind.

His towering top hat was another matter. I tried drawing one, but it simply didn’t look right. Eventually, we found a suitable hat in a collection of clip art and gave Grandpa the finishing touch he needed.

The bottle in his hand came from another piece of clip art.

Then we gave Grandpa something to dream about.

I found a tiny vintage illustration of a beautiful woman and placed her inside a thought bubble created in PowerPoint. The result left little doubt about what was occupying Grandpa’s thoughts.

And then there was the money.

I found the floating bills among PowerPoint’s graphic symbols, but they needed a little embellishment. So I inserted individual text boxes and added dollar signs to each one.

Suddenly, Grandpa was losing money as quickly as he was dreaming about women.

The finished label was a patchwork of vintage comic-strip characters, clip art, hand-drawn clothing, and PowerPoint graphics—all carefully assembled into one rather mischievous personality.

There he stood, grinning beneath his enormous top hat, bottle in hand, money flying from his pocket, and a beautiful woman on his mind.

Grandpa’s Fantasy was a fortified blueberry wine, but its label told a story all its own.

And creating that story was part of the fun.