What hap­pens when one’s favorite bev­er­age changes its label design for the first time in your life? Personally, I expe­ri­ence some mild dis­tress, a stab of long­ing for times just-barely past, and a sud­den urge to stock­pile all remain­ing bot­tles with the old design.

I’m not a huge fan of the new Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Juice labels. Sure, the “1930s Heritage Label” harkens back to a Martinelli’s of yes­ter­year, but to me, all the shim­mery glitzy sparkli­ness is just too, well, golden. The old label was suc­cess­ful because its white back­ground stood out from the bottle’s con­tents, giv­ing def­i­n­i­tion to the product’s form and mak­ing it read­ily iden­ti­fi­able. By try­ing to match the color of the ambrosia con­tained within, the new label blends in with the prod­uct itself, and the bottle’s no longer stands out from the crowd (or even itself) in a refrig­er­ated case.

Type-wise, the addi­tion of Eagle Bold (“Apple Juice”) is inter­est­ing, but I’m not sure it fits. I pre­fer the low-budget, “apple in a golden glass sur­rounded by 50s cham­pagne bub­bles” look.

Mmm, short­bread! So salty, sweet, but­tery and… authen­tic? Not in the case of “Waltz” short­bread rounds, found at my local mar­ket. I grabbed a box, amazed they were priced at only 99 cents, until I real­ized that this was not the famous (and heav­ily branded) Walker’s Shortbread of Scotland. No, this was Waltz, proudly founded in--hey!--1980, not 1898, and man­u­fac­tured in Malaysia, which is def­i­nitely not Scotland.

And yet, it looked authen­tic at first glance, didn’t it? They matched Walker’s pack­ag­ing almost exactly, mim­ic­k­ing every detail from the let­ter­ing down to the tar­tan back­drop. Despite the fact that some finer typo­graphic points were over­looked (like the inel­e­gant Arial used for “Established 1980″ and the mis­matched small caps in “Rounds”) and that Waltz’s art­work doesn’t match the orig­i­nal (Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and Dance at Bougival, I might add, have noth­ing to do with Scotland nor short­bread, but I guess they are both out of copy­right and royalty-free), all in all, this is a pretty solid counterfeit.