Castel Mimi — 9 Muses
The metaphysics of Bessarabian terroir
Strategy and narrative development for the 9 Muses collection: a cultural brand architecture that treats a wine range as a system of meaning rather than a product line.
Visit projectThe brief
A commercial brand sells an appetite. A cultural brand safeguards a civilisation’s memory.
Castel Mimi is a winery in Bulboaca, in the Anenii Noi region of Moldova. The 9 Muses collection needed to move beyond the generic language of luxury wine — the same adjectives, the same visual codes, the same borrowed European references — and claim a position that could only belong to this place.
The approach
Mythic cartography. The collection was anchored in the place itself: the terroir, the landscape, and the deep time of the region, treated as a source of meaning rather than a line of copy on a label.
Semiotic codes. The nine muses replace the standard industrial wine vernacular with a classical set of invocations, giving each wine a symbolic identity rather than a style descriptor. The collection is structured as a system, not a sequence of products.
The work was strategy and narrative: positioning, the conceptual model, and the symbolic architecture of the collection. Visual identity and packaging were executed separately by the client’s design partners.
The collection
The 9 Muses range names its wines after the muses. The publicly listed expressions include:
- Calliope, Clio, Erato, and Terpsichore appear in the collection’s public naming.
- Extra Dry Rosé Sparkling Wine — dry rosé, 13% abv
- Sauvignon Blanc — dry white, 12.5% abv
- Viorica — dry sparkling, 13% abv
- Fetească Albă — dry sparkling, 13% abv
- Rosé — dry rosé, 12.5% abv
- Cabernet Sauvignon — dry red, 14% abv
The winery is located in Bulboaca, Anenii Noi, Moldova.
Why it matters
The project is an example of the studio’s thesis in practice: a product range becomes a cultural property when its meaning is constructed with the same rigour as its production. The collection is available at castelmimi.md.