Left Bank Bordeaux
Live Virtual Auction, 7 November 2021
Fine Wine
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
About this Item
Château Mouton Rothschild is not only one of the finest Bordeaux wines, but it is also one of the world’s greatest. The First Growth from Pauillac holds an incredible track record for the most consistent and long-lived wines in all of Bordeaux. It can be argued that the modern age of Chateau Mouton Rothschild arose along with the modernization of the entire Bordeaux wine region.
Each year since 1945, the Château Mouton Rothschild label has been illustrated with an artwork by a leading painter, specially created for the vintage. Thus, the most famous names in contemporary painting have been brought together in a collection to which a new work is added each year. From one label to another, Mouton Rothschild has thus brought together some of the most celebrated artists of their day, including Miró, Chagall, Braque, Picasso, Tàpies, Francis Bacon, Dali, Balthus, Jeff Koons and even Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. The artists have complete freedom of creation, though certain themes, such as the vine, the pleasure of drinking and the ram, the Mouton Rothschild emblem, have proved a particularly rich source of inspiration.
The 2006 Vintage label was designed by Lucian Freud.
Born in Berlin, the famous English portrait painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis. Fleeing Nazi Germany, his father brought him to London in 1933 and he became a British citizen in 1939. His vocation became apparent on leaving school. He studied painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and then at Goldsmiths College in London. He then had a brief flirtation with surrealism. Initial recognition came quickly in 1951 when he was awarded the Arts Council prize for the Festival of Britain. In 1987-88, a travelling exhibition of his works in Washington, Paris, London and Berlin confirmed his place at the forefront of contemporary figurative realism and, in 1995, the exhibition devoted to him and his friend and fellow-painter Francis Bacon at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence underlined his provocative power and his vision of the human body marked by time and the world’s violence. His surprising depiction of Queen Elizabeth II in 2001 scorned the conventions of ceremonial portraiture. In 2008, one of his works was sold for the highest price ever attained by a living artist.
Lucian Freud is first and foremost a painter of flesh. Nacreous, marbled, disposed in precise and vigorous volumes, it gives their expressive power to nudes and battered faces, at once alive and set in an almost corpse-like stiffness.
Far from the tormented portraits and nudes for which he is renowned, for Mouton 2006 Lucian Freud has chosen a joyously exotic transposition of the pleasure of drinking, in which the vinestock is transformed into a springing palm tree and the winelover into a happily anticipatory zebra.
Provenance
Private Client
Critics Ratings
'Tasted at Bordeaux Index's annual 10-Year tasting in London. The 2006 Château Mouton-Rothschild has a brilliant bouquet that is extremely well defined: blackberry, minerals and graphite aromas that you could pluck from the ether. That sets you up nicely for what follows. The palate is very harmonious with supple tannin. The silver bead of acidity is beautifully judged and interwoven through this linear and classic Mouton that is reminiscent of those ethereal wines Baron Philippe oversaw during the 1950s. It is all about the precision and classicism without denuding the fruit intensity, to wit, a complete Mouton-Rothschild that is a strong candidate for wine of the vintage. This is the wine that really put winemaker Philippe Dhalluin on the map and rightly so." - Neal Martin, Wine Advocate (RobertParker.com), 97/100 (2016)