The winners of the Vinitaly Design Award 2026 were announced on Saturday evening 11 April 2026 at the Teatro Ristori in Verona. The competition, promoted by Verona Fiere, as part of Vinitaly, recognizes packaging as a strategic tool for brand market positioning and reinforces the identity of wine, spirits, beer and olive oil products.
Now, in its 30th edition and renewed under the artistic direction of Mario Di Paolo, the award confirms the increasingly central role of design in building perceived value and influencing consumer choices. During the evening, the Oro Del Sol label, created by Cartes in collaboration with Basile Adv, received the First Prize at the Private Label category.
The award winning Oro Del Sol label is not just a label but a statement of technical capabilities. It was created to push Cartes technology to its limits and to demonstrate how far pioneering engineering can go when printing, embellishment, and converting are no longer considered as separate stages but as one integrated production process.
The label was produced by the GT368, a 22 meters length modular platform machine with eight units and equipped with more than 20 special devices. All of them are designed to automate in a single pass an entire production run of high-end premium labels.
The GT360 platform allows the transformation of two blank face stocks into a ‘well finished’ premium label with the highest added value available, all in a single pass, printed on both front and back sides and ready to be applied on the bottle.
The strength of the GT360 series is in the combination within a single line, of tactile effects of high-build screen printing, braille, hot stamping and cast gold, embossing, label-on-label application, special coatings and lamination, perforation as well as the automatic removal of a die-cut window, laser engraving and finally the multiple awards winning JDS, Cartes’ proprietary digital screen embellishment system.
The Jet D-Screen makes it possible to create, with no tools, multi-level effects up to 800 microns thick, 3D gold effects and metallic doming in additon to variable data printing. The platform is completed by flatbed die-cutting, semi-rotary die-cutting, and the renowned laser die-cutting technology which Cartes was the first to introduce to the self-adhesive label market back in 1999.
The highly configured line is designed to turn the label into a multisensorial surface, where touch and visual impact with tactile quality and an extremely high production precision work together with positive effects, with the ability to compy with requirements of sustainability.
“But the real revolution is not only technical,” says Enrica Lodi, CMO of Cartes. “It is about bringing extreme creativity into industry and making it productive, scalable, and sustainable, even for short runs specially when everything changes at last minute. Today, printing is no longer just inking but transformation, added value and, finally granting a creative freedom path.”
