Cackling Crow: A Blackberry Port with a Dark Sense of Humor

Grandma had her Love Potion. Grandpa had his Fantasy.

And then there was the crow.

Cackling Crow was our fortified blackberry dessert wine, a port-style creation with 18% alcohol and a name that suggested a slightly mischievous personality.

For its label, Clyde and I wanted something quite different from the humorous characters we had used on our earlier novelty wines.

We settled on a dramatic nighttime scene: a black crow perched among bare tree branches, silhouetted against an enormous golden moon.

The crow and branches came from one of our Dover Publications books of copyright-free silhouette clip art. We selected the illustration and incorporated it into a background we created ourselves using PowerPoint.

We built the background by arranging, layering, and coloring shapes. A brilliant blue sky provided the setting, while a large yellow moon became the focal point.

Then we placed the black silhouettes over the colorful background.

The contrast was striking.

The crow and branches stood out sharply against the moon, while the surrounding blue gave the scene an almost theatrical quality.

Unlike Grandpa’s Fantasy, which required tracing, hand drawing, and assembling numerous small illustrations, Cackling Crow was created primarily through the combination of existing silhouette artwork and our own digital composition.

It was a different approach, but just as much fun.

The wine itself was made from blackberries and produced as a fortified, port-style dessert wine.

At 18% alcohol, it joined our collection of richer fruit wines, offering another departure from the traditional grape wines we produced at Hiddencroft.

And the name seemed perfectly suited to the illustration.

A solitary crow, bare branches, a moonlit sky—and somewhere in the imagination, the unmistakable sound of a crow cackling in the darkness.

Cackling Crow became another example of how our novelty wines allowed us to experiment with two different forms of creativity: winemaking and label design.