The art of wine in a vintage setting
Haunted manor inspires work on labels by moonlighting teacher
APPLETON — Though she loves teaching art by day in the Barker Central School District, Krista Beth Feltz doesn’t truly get into the spirit of things until the evening when she moonlights in the haunted Winery at Marjim Manor.
That’s when Feltz, 34, sits down in the 174-year-old East Lake Road mansion with its 100 windows and creates the multitude of beautiful wine labels that grace the bottles of the 25 wines sold by proprietor Margo Bittner.
Feltz is not shy about admitting she sometime bumps into a ghost or two late at night that have been known to haunt the old manor for more than a century.
“Strange things happen here,” Feltz says, in a self-mocking but serious tone. “I’ve had wine bottles fly off the wine racks and spin on the floor for no apparent reason. I’ve been here decorating late at night and I’ve heard footsteps walking by me when there wasn’t anybody there but me.”
She told The Buffalo News last week that her experiences at the manor, and the stories she’s heard about its history, have inspired many
of the wine labels and names of the wines sold there.
“We have one wine I call Lord of the Manor,” said Feltz, who uses graphic arts for her wine work. “It’s a dry, red wine which features a 19th century photograph and frame of Charles Ring, a former mansion owner. He is one of the resident ghosts that live here.”
If Ring is the ghost who tries to get her attention, he’s successful, Feltz said, but apparently not ghoulish.
“He doesn’t do anything malicious,” she said. “It’s kind of like he’s telling me, ‘Hey! I’m over here.’ ”
Feltz also designed a similar label for a sweet red wine, called Lady of the Manor, which features a framed photograph of Estelle Morse, who also lived in the mansion long ago.
“Both labels were special for me because I used the frames of photographs from some of my old family members from the 1800s in England. I scanned them into a computer to frame the photographs of Charles and Estelle that appear on the wine bottles,” Feltz said.
It seems the manor’s ghosts even influence the design on some labels.
For example, Heart of Gold, a semi-dry apricot wine, sports a gold heart rising out of a pool of liquid gold. The kicker is that “there are faint faces that showed up on the heart. I made the label, but I don’t know how those faces got there,” Feltz said.
As an artist, she said, “the labels I like the most are the ones that are personal, the ones that fit the house and come from little memories of stories I’ve heard and things I’ve seen while I was making them.”
For example, she said she came up with a name and label for a dry white wine called The Cat’s Meow.
It was one of the first labels she did for Margo Bittner and was inspired by the cats that would run here and there throughout the manor.
“I actually used a photo of my own cat Marvin on the label,” Feltz said. “He has since passed away, but we know people in Italy that like this wine, so Marvin has traveled farther in this world than I have.”
Feltz said she loves her part-time job at Marjim Manor “because Margo is very willing to let me be creative. As an artist, you have to love to have that kind of creative freedom.”
The Bittners and Feltz have all come up with names for Marjim Manor’s wines.
Another example is the dry Cabernet she named Carondelet. The label features two nuns in front of an old log cabin.
“That’s because this used to be St. Joseph’s on the Lake. It was a convent and a summer retreat for the Sisters of St. Joseph. Back when that order started in France, they had a log cabin called Carondelet, and that actually was why the nuns choose this spot,” she said. “It had a log cabin that came with the manor down by the Lake [Ontario]. The sisters saw that as a sign from God and made this house their convent.”
A wine called Starlight features the photographs of Helen and Stella, the grandmothers of her boss’ husband, James Bittner, whose names mean light and star, respectively. The photos run alongside a dark blue sky featuring stars in the background and a bright star in the middle, while a shooting star dots the “i” on the name.
Not every wine’s name is based on history.
Feltz said Strawberry Dreams Forever, a strawberry wine whose name is influenced by the Beatles’ song “Strawberry Fields,” features a label of three beautiful strawberries lying on pink feathers and floating on a stream of strawberry wine.
The blueberry wine, the manor’s sweetest, is called Blue Beryl, with a label showing a wine barrel with blueberry wine flowing out of its spigot. Feltz said she used a barrel and spigot that sits on the mansion property as a model for the label. The label also features blueberries that shine like sapphires and resemble barrels.
The label for A Pear Made in Heaven, a semi-sweet pear wine, features two pears with their stems leaning toward each other romantically, sequestered by soft mood lighting that oozes with intimacy.
Feltz said Applely Ever After, an apple wine mocking the fairy tale phrase “happily ever after,” shows three apple trees with bright green leaves and red apples on top and the foremost trunk with a heart carved into it along with the letters “MR+JB.” They stand for Margo Randall, Bittner’s maiden name, and James Bittner. It also features the small silhouettes of a young man and woman regarding each other lovingly.
“I went around with my family looking at apple trees for this and found one near the lake that has a fairy tale kind of face on it. So I took a photograph of it and used it on the label,” Feltz said.
Another label for a red wine featured old stamps in honor of one of James Bittner’s grandfathers, who was a postmaster in Rochester, Feltz said.
She also took a photo of a sunset on Lake Ontario by her Somerset home for a rose wine Marjim Manor makes.
And the label for a sweet plum wine called Treasure Beyond Measure was influenced by Margo Bittner’s five-year fight with breast cancer, which she survived. The label is pink with roses along the right side and a woman holding out a treasure box, which is flanked by a pink ribbon, the symbol for breast cancer.
By day, Feltz teaches general art to sixth-graders; studio in art, an advanced class for eighth-graders; advertising and design for high school students; and reading to sixth-graders.
“It’s very exciting,” Feltz said. “The kids do wonderful work.”
Meanwhile, Margo Bittner is pleased with Feltz’s work.
“We’ve been working together since before I opened the business. I was looking for a graphic designer,” Bittner said. “I knew Krista Beth’s mother, and she told me her daughter — a graphic designer — could help. So we’ve been working together for several years. We worked together to come up with some of the concepts for the way we’re running this place.”
As for the wine bottle labels, she said, “We work together on them. A lot of time, it’s just talking about an idea and we let it gel for a while. Then sooner or later, somebody comes up with something good and we say, ‘Hey! That works.’ ”
