Decision
Story before grid
No product grid above the fold. Region and process lead, with scroll-linked motion carrying the sequence, because a grid turns a bottle into a row in a spreadsheet before anyone has a reason to care about it.
Editorial UX • Visual Identity • Discovery Design
Most Wine Sites Sell Bottles. This One Sells Where They Came From.
Self-directed concept. No live product, nothing measured.
View Prototype(opens in a new tab)
Alpha Wine
Wine discovery concept · story-first
- Role
- Product Designer, self-directed
- Team
- Solo, self-directed concept
- Timeline
- 4 weeks
- What I owned
- Full visual identity
- Story-before-price discovery flow
- Chapter navigation, no filters
Problem
Buying wine online feels nothing like buying wine in person.
A good wine shop is a conversation: someone asks what you like, tells you where a bottle came from, and the price arrives last. Most wine sites invert that completely and open with a filterable grid, which is a spreadsheet with photographs.
Competitive landscape
| Discovery-flow attribute | Alpha Winedesigned to | Vivino | Wine.com | Naked Wines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Provenance shown before price | Yes | No | No | No |
| Editorial pacing over a product grid | Yes | No | No | No |
| Story-led product page structure | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Chapter-based, non-filter navigation | Yes | No | No | No |
Design Decisions
Decision
Provenance before price
Vineyard, vintage and tasting notes come first; price sits at the bottom of the page. In a shop the price is the last thing you ask, and putting it first turns every bottle into a comparison.
Decision
Chapters, not filters
Filters invite spec comparison, which is the behaviour this whole concept is arguing against. Navigation is chapter-based instead, so browsing runs by story rather than by attribute.
Why story-first, in published research
Alpha Wine is a concept with no live product, so none of these are its results. They are the consumer research the thesis rests on, and each card names the study it came from.
Finding
Region of origin significantly raised willingness to pay. Buyers paid more when they were given the full picture before they judged the wine, not after.
Ferreira, Costa Pinto & Lourenço-Gomes, Applied Economics 53(32), 2021 · experimental auction, n=168
Source: Ferreira, Costa Pinto & Lourenço-Gomes, Applied Economics 53(32), 2021 · experimental auction, n=168 (opens in a new tab)Counter-evidence
Sensory tasting notes moved willingness to pay by nothing at all. Competition awards moved it most, local production modestly. Story is not a synonym for description.
Eustice, McCole & Rutty, Tourism Management, 2019 · non-hypothetical experimental auction
Source: Eustice, McCole & Rutty, Tourism Management, 2019 · non-hypothetical experimental auction (opens in a new tab)Every figure above is someone else’s research, named and linked. None of it was measured on this concept, which was never built or tested. The last card contradicts the easy version of my argument and stays on the page for that reason.
Visual Identity
Restraint reads as premium. Every token removes noise so the photography and the prose carry the weight.
Colour tokens
#1E0024
Noir-Purple base
Backgrounds, reads as cellar depth
#C9A227
Gold accent
Aged provenance, used sparingly
#B76E79
Rose accent
Softens the palette
#1E0024
Base / Noir-Purple
#C9A227
Accent / Gold
#B76E79
Accent / Rose
The accent appears only at the moment of selection, never before it.
Typography
Display, Forum
Regular roman serif
Headline scale
Echoes wine label tradition
Body, Caudex
Regular
Holds 300-word essays
Tasting notes and winemaker stories
80 to 160px vertical rhythm, one product per key screen. Forum and Caudex are Alpha Wine's faces, not this portfolio's — load both in Framer and the specimen above stops showing a substitute.
