(Slate) - Everyone knows you can’t judge a book by its cover or a wine by its label, but we do so anyway. Barrel + Ink is a San Francisco company that unites independent winemakers and designers to create wines with bold, eye-catching packaging that treats the wine label as a blank canvas and the wine bottle as an objet d’art.

So far, Barrel + Ink has orchestrated four wine and design pairings, the most recent with Napa Valley winemaker Andy Erickson and San Francisco–based designerJessica Hische (who has designed film titles for Wes Anderson and a “love” stampfor the U.S. Postal Service).

These limited-edition wines are currently being made in small batches of 250 cases per release and sold mostly online. Barrel + Ink founder Corey Miller told me in an email that the company’s mission is to facilitate “a true one-off collaboration between designer and winemaker,” giving them “an opportunity to do something completely unique” that is not grounded in a winery’s existing branding. “It's truly a collaborative process where both elements are regarded with equal artistic value—as opposed to the label being relegated to a marketing tool,” he said.

Miller also stressed that his concept had nothing to do with “a whole class of labels that the industry calls, ‘look at me’ labels,” which are “usually put on cheap wine and used to sell high volume brands.” He said that “Barrel + Ink is the nexus between seemingly outlandish (at times) art paired with truly hand-crafted, small lot wines made by some of the best winemakers working today.”

The company’s target audience is the wine lover who might feel overwhelmed and intimidated by his or her lack of viticultural knowledge but drawn to the idea of using wine as a way to connect with other people, Miller said.

“We want to feel connected to wine but unless you're a serious wine geek, most of us just don't” he said, “[but] we live in a hyper-visual world and most of us feel pretty comfortable talking about what we do and don't like visually.” Since “we buy wine based on the label anyhow,” he said, why not “bring the winemaker out from behind the winery and the designer out from behind the brand.”

“It's easy to mistake what we're doing as making pretty bottles,” Miller added. “The art isn't intended to be a bridge to a sale, it's intended to be a bridge to a different kind of experience with wine.”