In 2000, Napa winemaker Dave Phinney released The Prisoner Wine Company’s flagship red blend. The label featured an 1810 etching by Spanish artist Francisco Goya called Le Petit Prisonnier. Part of a series that Goya titled The Disasters of War, it depicts a shackled prisoner.
Phinney's The Prisoner was a huge hit, launching his career into the stratosphere. His 2014 Orin Swift Machete red blend, another brand with an edgy label, landed at No. 6 among Wine Spectator's Top 100 Wines of 2016, the same year that he sold The Prisoner Wine Company to Constellation Brands for $285 million (and a few months later, he sold Orin Swift to Gallo). Around that same time, the brand was introducing new bottlings with equally dark themes, including Dérangé, featuring a bottle etched with tally marks intended to evoke a prisoner counting their time in confinement, and Eternally Silenced, with a label featuring a charcoal drawing of a mouthless man being consumed by the bottle's nearly entire wax seal.
Constellation converted the former Franciscan Estate tasting room in Napa Valley's St. Helena AVA into a new home for The Prisoner in 2019, and the space featured more of what many Prisoner fans had come to love about the brand's aesthetic: Shackles were hung from the walls, and some doors were equipped with heavy chains and padlocks. But criticism of the brand's glorification of (and capitalization on) imprisonment and trauma soon followed.
In response, Constellation made Corrections, a limited-edition wine label that is both on-brand in its continued reference to imprisonment while also supporting those who've been impacted by the prison system.
"100 million Americans have a family member who has been or is incarcerated, and we know that the system disproportionately impacts poor communities and people of color," read a statement issued by The Prisoner Wine Company upon the inaugural release of Corrections. "The dual meaning of Corrections is intentional. Synonymous with prisons, the name calls for an unflinching look at a system plagued by inequity and discrimination, but also offers a glimmer of hope. Although the obstacles facing reform are systemic, we believe in progress and the necessity of righting wrongs."
The inaugural release of Corrections, in 2022, featured three wines with labels created by Los Angeles–based artist and designer Chris Burnett. The $225 three-pack includes the Prisoner X Corrections Malbec Oakville Finding Flowers 2021, Viognier Oak Knoll District New Hope 2021 and Tempranillo Sonoma County The Other Side 2021, and has so far raised more than $25,000 for Rubicon Programs, a Northern California–based non-profit with a mission to "transform East Bay communities by equipping people to break the cycle of poverty."
And Constellation has tripled its minimum contribution for the second release, the 2021 Corrections Napa Valley Reserve, a red blend bottled exclusively in magnum and priced $150. The label features the image of a mixed-media work of art titled Apokaluptein:16389067 and created by Philadelphia-based artist Jesse Krimes during his five-year incarceration for non-violent drug offenses. Krimes is also a co-founder of the Center for Art and Advocacy, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists through scholarships and residencies.
“I made [Apokaluptein] the last three years of my sentence,” Krimes told Wine Spectator. “I was transferring imagery onto bedsheets. I made this piece, it’s 15 feet tall, 40 feet long, made out of 39 prison bedsheets." He says the work had to be smuggled out of prison, on account of said bedsheets not belonging to him. “Some of the officers would do shakedowns to confiscate the work, [since] you’re not allowed to alter prison property.”
On top of an initial $75,000 donation to the Center for Art and Advocacy, Constellation is also donating 5 percent of all sales of the Corrections Reserve 2021. Although Krimes hopes that one day his legacy is that the center “wouldn’t be needed [anymore].”
