Label This

NYC & DAVIS, CA, 2016 — Maynard Amerine, a professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis for nearly four decades, is widely considered to be the driving force behind the post-Prohibition wine industry in California. The over 5,000 labels he collected tell a story of the global wine industry from the 1800s through the 1950s.

Some were annotated, with Amerine often giving the wine a letter grade, or specifying when, where and with whom the bottle might have been drunk. His handwritten notations appear alongside many of the labels on this site.

View fullsize

View fullsize

The goal of Label This was to make these labels, and this history, searchable and accessible to wine lovers everywhere.

Label This was primarily developed with the open source Scribe API, developed in collaboration with the New York Public Library.

Before contributors could transcribe the labels, we needed to know which sections needed transcription. I designed an interface which presented users with images of the labels and had them mark areas for transcription by drawing boxes around each area of interest on the label, identified the regions as images or text, and then enabled them to transcribe the text on the label. Since humans can understand the context of an image on a label in ways that machines cannot, we also enabled users to describe any image that appeared on the labels.