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 When I went to Mumbai a couple of months ago for a special tasting of PFV wines, I was disappointed not to meet Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, owner of the Bordeaux First Growth Cheateau Mouton Rothschild. She had to leave India suddenly due to a personal emergency. I was also disappointed that they did not have their Chateau wine for tasting, but only their mass label Mouton Cadet on offer.
I had then mentioned light-heartedly to my friend Thierry de Tourniel, the chief for their Asia operations who had accompanied her from Singapore that the least they could have done was to bring the original label of the 2004, whose release had been announced recently (the news had been covered in delWine http://www.indianwineacademy.com ).
Château Mouton Rothschild 2004 has now been released and was on display at an exhibition at Sotheby's in New York that features the new label.
The label was painted by Prince Charles. Since the label was going on the 2004 vintage, Prince Charles had he decided to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, signed by Britain and France in 1904 to ensure that their imperial ambitions did not clash. The painting, a watercolour shows pine trees in the south of France . The label is signed by the Prince with the inscription,' to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale'.
The painting made by Prince Charles is the latest in a lseries that was started in 1945, when her father, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, began commissioning artists to do small paintings that look as good on labels.
Prince Charles now joins the august company of the world famous painters Marc Chagall, Robert Motherwell and Pablo Picasso,Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Francis bacon and Andy Warhol who did a collage of the Baron himself in 1975. Robert Wilson also did his own lettering in 2001.
No payment was exchanged for the painting.she said. "He gets some bottles of wine. That's the deal." The terms, she said, were the same as for all the previous label artists.
The labels and the original paintings are on display at Sotheby's, which were set to auction more than 200 lots of wine from the baroness's collection on Wednesday ( yesterday).
Baroness, the big B of Bordeaux has been decorated as 'Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur', the rare French civil honour. Same honour was bestowed on our big B of Bollywood, Amitabh Bacchan, last month.
Source and more details: International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com |
