Fine Wine & Art Lovers: # 4 - Château Mouton Rothschild and artists wine labels

Friday 13 December 2013

# 4 - Château Mouton Rothschild and artists wine labels

If you ask us, which Château has always connected closely to the art, we will say Mouton Rothschild without hesitation!

In 1945, Baron Philippe de Rothschild conceived the original idea of crowning the Mouton label with a work of art. Each year, a renowned artist is commissioned to do the artwork for that vintage, in exchange for ten cases of wine.

When those amazing paintings become wine labels...

(1) Picasso

(2) Jeff Koons

(3) Guiseppe Penone

(4) Anish Kapoor

(5) The Prince of Wales

(6) Bernar Venet

For us, wine is a piece of art, elegant, sensitive, passionate, and somehow unforgettable. Artists’ painting on the bottle of the wine gives me more attraction and mystery for the wine.

The video below shows us those beautiful labels from 1918 to 2008:

Chinese Artist Xu Lei has designed the label for the 2008 vintage of Chateau Mouton Rothschild:

The fact of choosing Chinese famous artist’s painting is a sign of the growing importance of the Chinese wine market. And the market responded immediately, the price upwards from the starting base of £1800 per case to £2200, and now prices are at least £6,000 per case.

But above the business motivation, we would like to focus on the artist and his painting. Lei is artistic director of Beijing’s Today Art Museum, one of the most famous painter in China.

His style is a mixture of tradition and innovation. His artist conception of his painting is advanced and mysterious. Every painting is telling a story, a suspenseful story about time, dream, and unexpected ending in an illusory space.