Archive note: written in December 2012, after the château sent me the label.
The label for Mouton Rothschild 2010 has an absent-minded graffiti over the classical repose. Jeff Koons took the Birth of Venus, a fresco from Pompeii, and drew over it in silver: a small sailing boat under a bright sun.
Luxury and humour are not easy bedfellows. Where luxury takes itself very seriously and conforms to rules, humour gets the uncontrollable giggles. If humour happens in luxury then it is not often intentional, which is why this label made me smile: a first growth with a sense of humour.
Koons’s work comments on the commercial culture we live in by blowing it up out of proportion to see it out of context. There’s the huge Puppy (1992) made out of flowers; Balloon Dog (1994 to 2000), extra-sized, twisted balloon art in mirror-polished stainless steel; or the self-portraits of him and his then wife Cicciolina, like a pornographic Botticelli, in Made in Heaven (nsfw). One of his early series was called Luxury and Degradation (1986), based on adverts for spirits such as Jim Beam and Hennessy, including The Civilized Way to Lay Down the Law. I have seen the Puppy a few times around the world and loved how it endeared itself to the very young and the very old.
It is an interesting choice by Mouton Rothschild. Is it a comment on the bubble-like prices of the 2010 vintage? Not likely, and the château’s own reading is that the drawing turns her into a “Venus with Vessel”, the boat carrying the wine off into the distance. After 2009, the 2010 was another high-priced vintage, but I prefer the 2010s to the full-frontal fruit in 2009.
Out of all the first growth Bordeaux, Mouton always feels more accessible in style. The labels are always whimsical and by serious artists, Picasso, Warhol and Francis Bacon among them since 1945, and the artists are paid in cases of Mouton, including their own vintage, which is part of the charm. When you don’t have to prove anything you can afford to laugh, and that is an even greater luxury than wine. Venus, sailing boat and all, doesn’t seem to mind.
Later in the archive: David Hockney’s 2014 Mouton Rothschild label, two glasses drawn in tribute to Baroness Philippine de Rothschild.
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