{"id":20137,"date":"2014-08-14T09:45:59","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T13:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/?p=20137"},"modified":"2022-11-12T13:07:20","modified_gmt":"2022-11-12T18:07:20","slug":"art-label-wine-artists-painters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/art-label-wine-artists-painters\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You Judge a Wine by its Label? It’s an Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wine<\/a><\/p>\n

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Continued from Part 1 of Wine Label Art<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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In an ocean of wine, the label is the siren song that says, \u201cTake me home with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many of us, buying wine is an exercise in shallowness: we think pretty pictures must mean good wine. We find fluffy creatures endearing.<\/p>\n

We believe the winery actually used those glistening grapes. We long to share that pastoral landscape or partake of ch\u00e2teau life. Like most marketing, wine labels are intensely aspirational.<\/p>\n

(That\u2019s probably why we have yet to see one featuring someone passed out on the floor.)<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t always so. In The Oxford Companion to Wine, Jancis Robinson says that l\"wineabels were first used around 1860, when merchants started selling wine in glass bottles and there were glues strong enough to attach the labels.<\/p>\n

But these were no works of art, just blunt statements indicating the merchant, producer, region and year. And they remained virtually the same for another sixty years.<\/p>\n

Then in 1924, just two years after Baron Philippe de Rothschild became the proprietor of his family\u2019s esteemed Bordeaux estate, Ch\u00e2teau Mouton Rothschild, the 22-year-old took the first of his revolutionary steps: he bottled his wine at the ch\u00e2teau rather than sending it in barrels to be bottled by the merchants who sold it.<\/p>\n

His next innovation was to create his own label, commissioning a poster artist Jean Carlu to design it. (There\u2019s a Canadian connection: Carlu also designed the Art Deco theatre and reception space atop the College Park stores in Toronto, still called \u201cThe Carlu.\u201d)<\/p>\n

For Rothschild\u2019s label, Carlu incorporated a stylized ram\u2019s head, partly as a nod to the baron\u2019s astrological sign (he was an Aries) and partly to acknowledge the family name Mouton (which means sheep or ram). \"wine<\/p>\n

Below the head is a Cubist image of a fan of arrows representing the lineages of the Rothschild family. For the first time, the producer\u2019s name, rather than the merchant\u2019s, was prominent.<\/p>\n

Other Bordeaux ch\u00e2teaux soon followed suit, gaining recognition for their own names and financial freedom from the powerful merchants.<\/p>\n

Rothschild used this label until 1945, when World War II ended. To celebrate the occasion, artist Philippe Jullian created a design incorporating Winston Churchill\u2019s two-fingered \u201cV\u201d for victory sign.<\/p>\n

Almost every year after that, Rothschild commissioned a different artist to design his label<\/strong><\/a> including: Jean Cocteau (1947), Georges Braque (1955), Salvador Dali (1958), Georges Mathieu (1961), Henry Moore (1964), Joan Mir\u00f3 (1969), Marc Chagall (1970), Andy Warhol (1975) and Keith Haring (1988).<\/p>\n

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Of special note was Pablo Picasso\u2019s 1973 design to celebrate the winery\u2019s elevation from second-growth to first-growth status in the Bordeaux classification of wines.<\/p>\n

\"wine<\/a>It was the only change ever made to the famous ranking dating back to 1855\u2014a tribute both to the quality of the wine and to the baron\u2019s tireless harassment of French authorities.<\/p>\n

In 1978, Montreal artist Jean-Paul Riopelle created two versions of the label, both variations on the wine stains left by the bottom of wine bottles.<\/p>\n

Rothschild couldn\u2019t decide between them, so he used both, making bottles from that vintage even more valuable to collectors.<\/p>\n

In 1982, to commemorate what the powerful American critic Robert Parker dubbed \u201cthe vintage of the century,\u201d John Huston painted a watercolor image of a ram dancing joyfully next to a bunch of grapes under a blue sky and orange sun.<\/p>\n

For the 1999 vintage, artist Raymond Savignac used \u201cle gag visual\u201d: a frisky ram in a woolly orange sweater kicking up his hind legs.<\/p>\n

There were only two years when no original was commissioned. In 1953, the label bore a portrait of the family patriarch, Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, to mark the centenary of the family\u2019s purchase of the estate.<\/p>\n

And in 1977, a label with words and no art<\/strong><\/a> honored the Queen Mother, who had stayed at the ch\u00e2teau that year.<\/p>\n

The tradition continues today: the baron\u2019s daughter, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, still commissions labels from artists.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, none has ever been paid cash; they were all reimbursed instead with five cases of the wine. That\u2019s not a bad deal when you consider that the latest vintage retails for about …<\/p>\n

Read Part 3 of Wine Label Art<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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  Continued from Part 1 of Wine Label Art   In an ocean of wine, the label is the siren song that says, \u201cTake me home with you.\u201d For many of us, buying wine is an exercise in shallowness: we think pretty pictures must mean good wine. We find fluffy creatures endearing. We believe the winery actually used those glistening grapes. We long to share that pastoral landscape or partake of ch\u00e2teau life. Like most marketing, wine labels are intensely aspirational. (That\u2019s probably why we have yet to see one featuring someone passed out on the floor.) But it wasn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1078,1077,1075,1079,1080,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-on-wine-label","category-wine-art","category-wine-label","category-wine-label-art","category-wine-label-design","category-wine-labels"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20137"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58706,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20137\/revisions\/58706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}