Is there value to cute wines?

My wife used to collect recipes from the newspaper. There are still a lot that we've used and still more that we are still trying out even though some are many, many years old. Of course now, new recipes come from the internet. It's more convenient since one can match inhouse ingredients with existing recipes.

On one that she showed me had a wine review on the other side. It talked about a recent trend (2005) of cute wines. You know, ones with crazy labels.

This article was clipped just when it was getting interesting. "Putting aside personal, tomboy distaste, wines designed by focus group tend toward lowest common denominator blandness. They lose all relation to the living, ever-changing mystery in a bottle, and then wine ceases to be the most interesting of all drinks and becomes ..........." That's where it ends, but I'm sure you can fill in the rest.

I keep trying different wines paying attention to the labels as well as their age and where they come from. More and more that "ever-changing mystery in a bottle" comes from those less than faddish labels.