How do two people who run a San Francisco-based graphic design firm come to develop their own wine brand?

This is about more than just wine, it is about an entire concept, an entire experience, a new way to look at blending wine and play through the wines and the people of JAQK Cellars.

Katie Jain and Joel Templin of Hatch Design are the creators of JAQK Cellars, with the help of master winemaker Craig MacLean.

“We wanted to start hatching our own brands, for purely selfish reasons — we wanted our own total control,” Templin said.

Jain called it “an incubator for our own products.”

The pair said they were looking for a way to develop a brand that went beyond the wine itself.

“What if you developed one with a bigger concept?” Templin said.

Combining some of their interests, including Jain’s enthusiasm for poker and Templin’s competitive nature, they worked up an idea to build their brand around what you would come across inside a casino.

With the World Series of Poker being the third largest event on cable television and poker chips among the top three sellers on Amazon.com for the last three years, the duo set out to combine their branding of wine with a fun concept of poker and the gaming industry.

Now you understand the spelling. JAQK for the top four cards in a deck of cards, the Ace, King, Queen and Jack.

The concept was set, now where to go with it? Templin and Jain worked with people in the wine industry through companies such as Fosters and Constellation Brands and MacLean Wines. They contacted well-known winemaker Craig MacLean to ask him about the idea.

“We wanted to have some more fun with it, that’s where it started,” Templin said.

They scheduled lunch with MacLean at Rutherford Grill, Templin and Jain said, thinking he could be a sounding board for their idea.

When they asked him if thought they were crazy to try such a concept, Templin said, MacLean felt the idea was so good that he wanted to be a partner and their winemaker. So from searching for wine to label as their own, they now had a person with more than 20 years in the industry developing their own label.

“Our most incredible asset is Craig MacLean,” Jain said. “We had close to 5000 cases from our first vintage and we sold out the first year.” MacLean has developed wines for Cain Vineyard and Spring Mountain Vineyards, among others.

Register wine writer L. Pierce Carson praised the JAQK Cellars 2006 High Roller Cabernet Sauvignon that he tasted during an April event at Acme Fine Wines in St. Helena.

“With more than two decades experience in Napa Valley Cellars, ranging from Cain to Ahnfeldt, Craig MacLean has blended grapes from hillside and benchlands for this new wine brand’s top-drawer cabernet sauvignon. Fruit comes from Rutherford, Oakville and Coombsville (87 percent cabernet sauvignon, 9 percent merlot and 4 percent malbec) for this brawny blend. Bing cherries, Santa Rosa plums and cassis dance on the palate to the beat of the cab over a malbec bass line, and finishes with a subtle twirl of lush merlot,” Carson wrote in his May 1 column in the Register.

A story behind each bottle

Bright patterns, including mosaics of the four suits — clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades — in a deck of playing cards are blended into many of the designs used by JAQK Cellars.

“The exciting concept of the packaging draws people in,” Templin said. “Each bottle has a different story.”

At a recent winetasting event in Carmel, Jain and Templin said people were queued up three to four deep at times, not only to enjoy the wine but because they were drawn in by the packaging.

“People were interested in the bottles as a great gift item, they were even asking for the empty bottles because they do not want to throw them away,” said Templin.

Each bottle has a design not previously seen within the wine industry. Their signature wine, the High Roller, has a poker chip — with the wine’s name emblazoned on it — extending out from the bottle itself.

There are also stories on bottles

The Black Clover merlot, they say, is an homage to the club suit; on the bottle’s back is an explanation of the history of the four-leaf clover  in Irish lore.

Soldiers of Fortune shiraz, Templin said, references the Jacks in the deck of cards. There are four different labels for the shiraz, one for each suit.

The 22 Black cabernet sauvignon shows on its label a part of a roulette wheel with the ball having stopped on 22. “This is really meant to be about play,” Templin said. “Bogie in Casablanca put his money on 22 black.”

Jain said the Bone Dance merlot tells the history and evolution of the game of craps, while the Pearl Handle chardonnay — with a design to look like an old western card — has four different labels. There are four separate Pearl Handle labels, and when the bottle is turned around, a different bullet can be seen on each. The ace in a deck of cards is referred to as a bullet, so the labels show all four aces represented.

“Over the course of a year we developed all eight wines,” said Jain. “There is more we want to produce and we will start creating more.”

A different approach to a tasting room

Whereas JAQK Cellars is about more than the wine itself, the team’s idea of a tasting room is that it is for more than sampling the wines.

“We want to create a destination, a place to play games, have fun and enjoy some great JAQK Cellars wine,” Templin said. “Imagine the JAQK tasting room down the road, a design that that creates a place to play in Napa.”

He talked about a concept where there would be a lounge area to taste wine, with the ability to enjoy games of chance and the like included.

A five-year plan could include taking the idea of JAQK lounges and having them sprout up in San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas and other cities.

“We know design can make a huge difference,” Templin said. “We are kind of all-in as far as that goes.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article included the wrong number of cases sold out the first year.