Alain Milliat sparkling grape juice: two tables and a packshot

Alain Milliat is a French fruit juice house founded in 1997. Its founder, the grandson and son of farmers and a farmer himself, took over the family farm at Orliénas near Lyon in 1983 and spent fifteen years restoring and replanting plots in the traditional way. The production workshop is now in Valence, in the Drôme; the house is sold to fine-dining restaurants, hotels and delicatessens, and is present in more than twenty countries.

The shoot covered two sparkling grape juices: a Chardonnay blanc de blancs and a Pinot Noir blanc de noirs, the latter in both 37.5cl and 75cl. The commission came from the brand itself, and it took place in Paris.

The whole picture problem fits in one sentence: it is grape juice, and it has to be served as something else. The bottle carries the codes, the wire cage, the foil, the words blanc de blancs and blanc de noirs, and yet nothing here claims to be wine. A photograph that pushed the imitation too far would lie; one that refused it would miss what the product promises.

The answer was in the glass. Served in a fine-stemmed glass, filled to the right height, the liquid reads as a service rather than as a drink. That is the detail that decides it, and it is settled before a single light goes on.

A clear bottle holding a clear liquid is a surface that reflects everything: the window, the ceiling, the light, the photographer. None of it is recoverable in retouching, or only at the price of a dead image. What makes the picture is the large soft surfaces placed out of frame, the black flags that give the bottle its edge back, and the exact position of the source relative to the label.

That is where the backlit linen of the packshots comes from. It passes through the liquid instead of bouncing off it, which is what gives the Chardonnay its colour and lets the bubbles exist. On the table the constraint is the same but inverted: the light belongs to the room, it is very low, and the work is to hold it rather than add to it.

A brand launching an alcohol-free sparkling juice does not have one audience but two, and they are not photographed the same way. There is brunch, several people, full daylight, where the product sits among pancakes, eggs and coffee, and where it gains from being held, poured and passed along.

Those frames are made at the tempo of the people, not of the table. You do not direct a laugh; you prepare the frame, set the bottle so it stays legible whatever happens, and let the meal happen. The number of frames is what separates a living picture from a played one.

The other occasion is the exact reverse. A table laid for a celebration at dusk, two candles, pears, a bouquet, and light falling from three directions at once. The contrast is enormous, the flame burns out and the cloth sinks away, and the white label is the first thing to disappear if you let it.

That is the moment in a shoot where slowing down pays most. Placing the bottle so it catches a highlight, setting the height of the flame, deciding what stays sharp and what falls away: each of those decisions is worth more than one more frame.

A family house is poorly told in packshots alone. So the portraits hold their place in the series, outdoors against the ivy for one, in the kitchen in front of the steel-framed window for the other, with the same principle as the rest: the light of the room, worked, never replaced.

It is also the best use of a brand shoot. The same hours produce the packshot that will serve the product page for years, the table images that feed social, and the portraits that go to the press. Three image banks that follow different rules, made in the same place on the same day.