It’s a simple truth: most of us purchase wine based on our instant reaction to the wine label. “The wine label really only has about 1.5 seconds to make an impact,” notes John Lawlor, co-founder of Real Picture Research, a visual engagement research company. Lawlor and fellow co-founder, Don White, spend their days researching the impact of wine labels. “At the point of purchase the only real info the consumer has is the label, and within that 1.5 seconds we draw so many conclusions. Wine is such an image product so the label is a big part of the impression.” (Click here to see the label slideshow)

For this year’s Coolest Wine Label winners we asked Lawlor to put them to his marketing test and report on the results. The operative term for the results: consistency. “Across the board the Coolest Wine Labels won big for our ‘grabs attention’ category,” notes White. In fact every label in the slideshow ranked above the median, a result which Lawlor notes, “is quite phenomenal. We tested 81 bottles in this study and the Forbes.com Coolest Wine Labels tested better than anything else in the study.”