 According to the Drinks Business, Sheldon’s Wine Cellars in Shipston-on-Stour in Cotswold, near London, quickly created the new label while the Press was reporting the incident and named one of their stock Rosé as the Royal Blush. The label features a naked Harry perched on a billiards table, a reference to his Las Vegas antics involving a pool side party with US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte followed by a game of strip-billiards in his suite with a hen party.
According to the company manager who reportedly told a local newspaper the Cotswold Journal, “Customers seem to love it and it has been flying off the shelves; our rosé sales are up by 200%.” Within hours of the embarrassing incident, which saw the 27-year-old royal caught on camera playing a game of ‘naked billiards’ in his Las Vegas hotel room, Shipston firm Sheldon’s Wine Cellars had dozens of bottles of its new “Royal Blush” wine lining the shelves.
The shop already had a Tannat-based French 2011 rosé wine in stock and was planning to sell it under its own label. But as news of the scandal broke, manager Peter Creek and his staff quickly went back to the drawing board and knocked out a new label featuring a quirky cartoon take on the Vegas scene.“We haven’t done anything like this before but we thought this merited a bit of fun and was too good an opportunity to miss,” he told the journal.
The label uses a painting by artist Dan Lacey and shows Prince Harry making a bare-bottom trick shot on a billiard table. It is one of several images that various artists and bloggers painted in the wake of the scandal to get around a media ban before the actual images went viral and finally appeared in the pages of The Sun.The royally embarrassing moment has thus become a commemorative of Prince Harry.
The artist is apparently quite pleased with the publicity. On a blog where he posted the picture of the bottle, he says ‘Thanks to Sheldon's Wines in Shipston on Stour, Warwickshire, UK which is honoring Prince Harry by producing a limited run of Royal Blush, and which will feature my 'Prince Harry Nude Billiards' Painting as the label’.
Such an act would have invited endless debate in India and eventually landed the store into trouble if not jail. It brings back the memory of the late Indian iconic artist M F Hussain who had painted a Hindu goddess in the nude and had criminal cases filed against him. He stayed away from India during the last years of his life, ironically dying in London in June last year.
The wine is pedantically described on the merchant’s website as, “vivid pale strawberry pink with aromas of crushed red berries and is uncomplicated and easy drinking French rosé made from Tannat.” The limited edition label is available for £ 7.50. |