Chêne Bleu
"From little acorns, mighty oaks grow" - The Chêne Bleu story, told their way
Web design and development. Animated brand film. Storytelling and brand narrative.
From the Soil of Provence.
Into Something Extraordinary.
High above the Provençal plains, where the vines of Mont Ventoux give way to wild forest and ancient stone, sits La Verrière - a ninth-century priory that has been producing wine since 1427. Chêne Bleu is what grows here: an award-winning range of regenerative organic fine wines, made with an almost radical commitment to the land, the wildlife, and the centuries of history embedded in the estate.
The name itself carries the weight of the place. The great blue oak - Chêne Bleu - dominates the estate's visual identity, its spreading canopy home to the bees, butterflies, rabbits, and birds that populate both the label and the landscape. Chêne Bleu's wines are not simply products; they are the distillation of an ecosystem, a philosophy, and a love story - that of Abelard and Héloïse, whose tale of devotion and resilience the brand has made its own.
Chêne Bleu sits at the heart of a wider group that encompasses three distinct wineries, the estate accommodation at La Verrière, and a portfolio of experiences - from tours and tastings to extreme wine education. For a brand this rich, this layered, this alive with story, the digital challenge is not a lack of content. It is how to do justice to it.
What we delivered
- 01Brand film - full production, storyboard, CGI/3D animation and character design
- 02Bespoke 3D bottle model and animation
- 03Interactive game built it website experience - hotspot-driven web game built on the brand's illustration world
- 04Bunny hunt - a hidden discovery game embedded within the interactive experience
- 05Group landing page - unifying each aspect of the Chene Bleu Group under one immersive digital gateway
- 06Illustration adaptation - extending the existing brand illustration style for new digital contexts
The Challenge
Chêne Bleu's brand world is one of the most visually and narratively distinctive in European fine wine. Its label - a dense, hand-illustrated scene teeming with oak leaves, wildlife, Provençal terrain, and characters drawn from the estate's own folklore - is a work of art in its own right. The brand's tone is learned and literary but never stuffy: serious about wine, gleefully serious about life.
The existing digital estate, built on Squarespace, did what it needed to do: it told the story, listed the wines, opened the shop. But it operated at a single register - informational, static, contained. It did not invite exploration. It did not surprise. And for a brand built around the idea of hidden depth - wildlife concealed in the label, stories buried in the estate, characters waiting to be discovered - a website that simply presented information felt like a missed opportunity of some size.
The group dimension added further complexity. Chêne Bleu's three wineries each have distinct identities and audiences, but share a DNA: the same commitment to land, craft, and character. There was no unified digital gateway - no single place where the group's breadth could be appreciated and navigated. Visitors arriving at any one property were unlikely to discover the others.
The brief, then, was not to rebuild from scratch - the Squarespace infrastructure had value, and the brand's own illustration world was too good to abandon. It was to build on it: to surround what existed with experiences distinctive enough to change how the whole brand felt online.
We approached Chêne Bleu not as a web project but as a world-building exercise.
The brand already had its mythology - the oak, the bees, the buried stories, the Abelard and Héloïse thread running through everything. Our job was to bring that mythology to life in digital form: to make the invisible visible, the static animated, the passive interactive.
Three distinct commissions emerged from that thinking, each addressing a different dimension of the challenge. A brand film that would introduce Chêne Bleu's world with the full force of cinematic production. An interactive label experience that would reward curiosity with discovery. And a group landing page that would for the first time present the three wineries as a coherent, navigable whole.
Across all three, the guiding principle was consistency with invention: every creative decision had to feel native to the Chêne Bleu world, faithful to its illustration style and its tone, while pushing well beyond what the brand had done before.
The Brand Film
Full Production - Storyboard to Screen
The brand film began, as all good films do, with a question: what is Chêne Bleu, really?
Not what it makes, or where it is, but what it feels like to be there - to stand in the vineyard at dawn, to trace the label's illustrations with your finger, to understand that the wine in your glass is the product of centuries of a single place doing what it does best.
We took that feeling and built a film around it.
The production process was comprehensive: from initial concept and storyboarding through to character design, CGI/3D animation, and final edit.
Every element was produced in-house, giving us the creative control to ensure that the film felt genuinely of the Chêne Bleu world rather than a generic luxury wine production.
The Interactive Label Experience
Bringing the Label to Life
The creative centrepiece of the film is the translation of Chêne Bleu's flat, hand-illustrated label world into a three-dimensional animated scene. The oak, the wildlife, the Provençal landscape - elements that exist as ink on paper - are reimagined as living, breathing, moving things. Leaves turn in a breeze. A rabbit crosses the foreground. The great blue oak rises into a Provençal sky.
To anchor this world physically, we built a custom 3D model of the Chêne Bleu bottle - modelled, lit, and animated with the same precision applied to the estate's own illustration work. The bottle moves through the film as both object and symbol: a vessel for the world contained within the label.
The result is a film that functions as both brand statement and act of imagination - a work that rewards the viewer who knows the label and enchants the viewer who doesn't. It can live on the website, at trade events, in press packs, and on social media without losing its power in any context.
An Invitation to Look More Closely
Chêne Bleu's label has always rewarded attention. Spend time with it and you find things you didn't notice before: a bird in the oak's canopy, a figure half-hidden in the vines, details that speak to the estate's history and ecology. The label is, in a sense, already a game - it just needed the right medium to make that play explicit.
We built an interactive web experience centred on the label illustration, inviting visitors to explore it as you might explore the estate itself: with curiosity, patience, and the occasional reward for looking in unexpected places. Hovering over characters and landmarks within the illustration reveals information - the story behind that element of the Chêne Bleu world, told in the brand's distinctive voice.
The illustration style itself was already fully formed - one of the strongest in the wine world - and we built directly on that foundation, extending it into new interactive contexts while remaining entirely faithful to its visual language and character. The result feels less like a digital product and more like the label having learned to speak.
The Group Landing Page
The landing page commission addressed the group-level challenge: for the first time, creating a single digital destination that could introduce Chêne Bleu's three wineries - the flagship, Chêne Bleu itself; La Verrière, the estate and accommodation offer; and Extreme Wine, the wine education programme - as a coherent, navigable whole.
The design is built around the brand's existing illustration world, adapted and extended to serve a new purpose. Where the label's illustrations are dense and intricate, the landing page has room to breathe: the great oak, the rolling vineyard, the estate buildings, the wildlife - all present, but given space to operate as an environment rather than a composition. Visitors are placed within the world before they are asked to navigate it.
Each of the three business arms has a dedicated presence on the page, with its own card, copy, and call to action. But they are not presented as separate links in a contents list - they emerge from the illustration world as natural destinations within it. The dotted paths that wind between buildings and landmarks on the page are drawn directly from the visual language of the brand's own maps and labels: you are not choosing a category, you are deciding where in this world to go next.
A word on craft and context - building on the Squarespace sites
Chêne Bleu's individual winery sites are built on Squarespace - a capable platform, but one that, by its nature, produces experiences that tend to converge on a recognisable type. The landing page, the interactive label experience, and the brand film do not replace those sites. They surround them. They give visitors a reason to arrive with anticipation rather than intention, and leave with a sense that they have encountered something genuinely singular.
This is the strategic logic of the work as a whole: where the Squarespace infrastructure provides reliability and manageability, our work provides distinction. The result is a digital estate that functions commercially and expresses the brand with the depth and originality it deserves - one that could not be mistaken, for even a moment, for any other wine producer in the world.
The Bunny Hunt
Embedded within the interactive experience is a secondary game: the bunny hunt.
Chêne Bleu's rabbits are a recurring motif across the estate's visual identity - they appear in the label, in the landscape, in the brand's wider storytelling - and we turned that motif into a playful discovery mechanic.
Hidden across the interactive illustration, a number of rabbits wait to be found. Locating them all becomes a reason to look everywhere, to slow down, to spend time in the brand's world rather than passing through it.
It is the kind of detail that says more about a brand than any amount of copy. It says: we don't take ourselves too seriously. We believe that wine should be fun. We think the best experiences are the ones that give you something to discover. All of which is entirely, perfectly Chêne Bleu.
Results and Impact
The work is live and ongoing - the group landing page remains in active development as the final pieces are brought together. Early response to the brand film and the interactive experience has been strong, with particular enthusiasm from trade partners for whom the work has served as a powerful introduction to the breadth and character of the Chêne Bleu world.
The interactive experience has extended time spent with the brand online - visitors who engage with it explore more of the site, spend longer with the content, and leave with a clearer sense of what makes Chêne Bleu different.
The bunny hunt, in particular, has generated organic social sharing from visitors who delight in finding - and telling others to find - all the hidden rabbits.
When the group landing page completes, it will for the first time give Chêne Bleu's three businesses a shared digital presence commensurate with their shared ambition. The work is designed to grow: as the group's story develops, the illustration world and the interactive mechanics provide a flexible, extensible platform on which new chapters can be written.
