Chateau Mouton Rothschild has commissioned a South Korean artist Lee Ufan to design the label on its Bordeaux 2013 vintage first wine.
Some of the world’s greatest artists have illustrated Mouton Rothschild vintages for decades and the Medoc first growth has made this an annual tradition since 1945.
Lee Ufan was chosen to create the Mouton Rothschild 2013 label and he and has opted for simplicity with a purple and red mark above the estate’s logo.
Mouton Rothschild 2013 label
Mouton Rothschild said of the design, ‘The initially indecisive purple of the drawing gradually attains its full richness, just as a great wine is patiently brought to fulfilment in the secret of the vat house.’
Bordeaux 2013 was one of the most challenging vintages for the region in the past two decades, but a tasting in London last week showed that several chateaux have still made good wines – even if quantities are very small in some cases.
Lee Ufan was born in a South Korean mountain village in 1936. Twenty years later, he moved to Tokyo’s Nihon University and has since built a career as an artist.
He has won the UNESCO Prize at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000 and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2001, and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris and the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York.
Mouton’s association with artists designing its labels began in 1924, when Jean Carlu produced artwork for Baron Philippe de Rothschild.
