I feel the visual aspect of any product is important. If someone had the best tasting wine but a picture of a steaming pile of poo on it...it probably wouldn't be the best seller but like you said the casino chip it would spike alot more peoples interest. I have chosen wine because of it's label I tend to gravitate to those first...my feeling is if it looks awesome...then the company must be able to afford for it to look awesome...therefore people like it. Whereas a plain bottle doesn't show me great taste and customer satisfaction cause the company can't even manage to put an awesome label on it...I'm done rambling...:)

I have to be honest, when I go to a liquor store to buy wine, bottle design means a lot to me. I'm not a major connoisseur of wines, and now, I can't drink them at all, but back when I could (meds for Lupus interfere with drinking wine... or is it drinking wine interferes with meds?), the bottle design was still a big factor.

I love Chianti. My favorite Chianti was purchased because it had a cute wicker basket wrapping the bottle. (shrug)

I collect bottles. I don't know why. I love bottles, so neat bottles for wine get me to buy them even if I don't like the wine, just so I can have the bottle!

I don't know, because I'm one of those people whom marketers hate.

I always pick up a package, turn it around, and read the ingredients, and when I store them on my selves at home, I turn them around so that I only see the backside of the boxes and bottles with all the detailed product information, because I find their logo-istic images offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities.

When I buy wine, I look at what kind of grape it was made of, how long it was aged, sometimes what region it was from and what year, and the sweetness rating.

Then, of those that fit the bill, I line them up and look at the price.

I think packaging is very important to me, I'm sorry to say. I don't participate in many wine tasting events, so the only way I know if a wine is really any good (when I'm tired at the grocery store) is to pick a bottle that's "neat" or "cute" or "funky". And repeat this pattern every week or two.

My favorite bottles? The ones shaped like odd things. Ones with an owl on the label. Or a penguin.

Not big into the footprint labels or the boring labels.

Hey, it's all I have to go on! And frankly, I think the Pentawards are a helluva lot more legitimate then the Grammys, so there you go. Makes perfect sense to me.

Of course curb appeal is a concideration in such a competitive market and I am sure many bottles of vino are purchased due to the bottle and label design alone.
For myself however, its not about the container, its all about whats in the container.
http://www.piersidegallery.com/artists/stiltz/ts2004b-opusone.jpg
I do my research beforehand when purchasing wine so i have a pretty good idea what I am buying before I pull a cork.
I do check the bottle and label for certain details that are important however.

1. Is it the correct bottle design to host the type of wine thats in it.
http://www.cellarnotes.net/bottleshapes.html

2. Does the label give me the information that identifies the paticular wine.
Some labels give a great deal of information about the wine to a point that allows you to track it to an individual plot of grapevines, where other labels give very little information.
http://www.wineintro.com/labels/samples/

3. Is the bottle in good condition as for how its been handled.(i'll pass on a good bottle if it looks as though it has been rolling around in the bed of a truck for a week)

No I have never picked a bottle of wine based solely upon the artfullness of its package.
Its all about the nectar within for me, they can recycle the bottle.
I do however collect corks.
You can make some pretty cool stuff out of wine corks
http://www.wineintro.com/products/corks/
http://www.thegreenhead.com/imgs/wine-cork-wreath-1.jpg

I don't drink wine often, but I have certain things I look for.

One of them is that the bottle is of standard shape, size, and color. Over the years, i have found that often if a wine company is spending money of distinctive shapes and colors of bottles, the product has suffered elsewhere. I rarely go back to the same wine twice, as I do not drink often. I prefer to have a new experience when I do. This is not to say that I will not go to a different variety of the same brand, or have a second bottle of the same wine. Win just has this personality of it's own, and every new wine is like a new conversation with a new person.

And like a person who is dressed up in loud colors, who shouts across the room. Like a person who is determined to stand out no matter what. A wine in a fancy shaped bottle, that screams at you is often lacking on the inside, and I find the conversation wanting.

Label designs that attract the eye are good. Names that are memorable in a dignified or friendly way. And informative. I like to know where the grapes were stomped.

So yes, the bottle design is important. It tells me when I need to stop, and when I need to move on.