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Wine labels used to be simple.
 They were designed to tell you what was in the bottle, though, admittedly, it sometimes seemed as though German and French labels were created to obscure that information and require buyers to become experts before they could even tell what they were buying.
Those days are long over. Now wine producers strive to create flashy, eye-catching packages that yell "Buy me." Sometimes these packages have questionable connection to the wine, and some are even in bad taste.
France contributes Fat Bastard with its chubby hippopotamus, and Italy, the reportedly undrinkable Il Bastardo. (There are a few other brands sporting that "Italian" term, too.)
 Even worse are Stu Pedasso (say it aloud), Old Tart and Old Fart. The descriptive Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand recalls critics’ favorite descriptors of that wine. Spatzendreck, a wine from Germany whose name, roughly translated, means sparrow, er, droppings, was named after a bird that once contributed fertilizer to the yeast in a fermenting vat.
In the past, most traditional European labels bore geographic names, and American producers followed that lead, choosing the names of popular European wine regions for their products with little regard for the varieties involved, or the characteristics of the wines.
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