Rubicon is also helping the Prisoner establish its own second-chance hiring program. Every year, Ekundayo said, the lineup of wines will change, and they’ll choose a new label artist and a new fund recipient. Only 300 cases of Corrections wine were produced - a Viognier, a Malbec and a Tempranillo-Malbec-Syrah blend. The winery enlisted Los Angeles artist Chris Burnett to design the three Corrections labels, abstract renderings intended to showcase “a sense of hope,” Ekundayo said - which feels like a welcome departure from the sexy-shackle imagery. Rubicon provides services to many formerly incarcerated people, including helping them find employment. One of her major developments is the release of a new wine brand, Corrections, whose proceeds go to Rubicon Programs, an anti-poverty nonprofit in the East Bay. Those aesthetics may actually be the most impactful aspect of these wines. Nevertheless, much of what the company has done during the last year has been behind the scenes, and Ekundayo did not detail any plans to change the core aesthetics of the Prisoner and its spin-off brands. She had already been hoping to change the Prisoner’s image from one that seemed to fetishize incarceration to one that advocated for prison reform, she said, and “the article accelerated that work.”Īs she described that work to me, it was clear that Ekundayo takes the Prisoner’s responsibility seriously and wants to build it into something better. That didn’t give her much time to turn around the marketing machine that had driven the Prisoner’s aesthetics for years. Her tenure had been brief at publication time: Ekundayo joined the Prisoner in August 2021, just a couple months before the article came out. This wine has a unique responsibility - and a unique opportunity. Its success has spawned copycat brands, all aiming to capture the Prisoner’s viral combination of dark, edgy labeling and rich-tasting red wine. It’s one of the most powerful wines in existence: Last year its flagship red blend was the third-best-selling wine over $25 in the U.S., according to data analytics firm Information Resources Inc. That’s particularly significant because the Prisoner isn’t just any wine. Helena tasting room was outfitted in shackles and prison cell-like bars, and that the company released wines with lurid names like Derange and Eternally Silenced - all of which seemed to trivialize the harsh realities of mass incarceration in our society. I was struck by how distasteful it seemed that the St. Preston Gannaway/Special to The ChronicleĪbout a year ago, I wrote a big story about the Prisoner Wine Co., a winery that has become wildly successful while appearing to glamorize tropes of incarceration.
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