What If Banksy Designed the Next Mouton Rothschild Label?
Wine · Art · A Thought Experiment
Banksy Would Never Just Design a Mouton Label
Every year since 1945, Château Mouton Rothschild has asked a famous artist to paint its label. Picasso did it. Warhol did it. The King did it. So what would happen if the phone call went to the one artist whose entire career is built on making institutions look faintly ridiculous? Nothing tidy, is my guess.
By Vim · Editor of 12×75 ·
Mouton Rothschild has spent eighty years turning a wine label into the most exclusive art gallery in the world. One artist a year. One small rectangle of paper. No brief, no fee, complete creative freedom, and a bottle that will be opened, on average, by somebody who paid more for it than for the painting on the front, which is the kind of arithmetic I usually reserve for asking whether expensive wine tastes better or why whisky has a Rolex problem. It is the most controlled luxury ritual in Bordeaux, which is saying something, and it has been running like a Swiss watch since the end of the war.
Now imagine the phone call goes to Banksy. Not the polite version, where an anonymous studio emails over a JPEG and somebody at the château approves it on Teams. The proper version, where one of the most secretive, most process-controlled institutions in wine meets the one artist whose whole brand is anonymity, sabotage and the public humiliation of exactly this kind of institution. I have thought about this far longer than is healthy, roughly since I wrote about the man who faked the world’s rarest wines and realised the label was the thing people were really buying. And I am fairly sure of one thing. He would not just design a label.
Mouton turned the wine label into an art gallery
The facts first, because they are stranger than the joke. In 1924 Baron Philippe de Rothschild, having decided to bottle at the château, commissioned a poster artist called Jean Carlu to design a label. It was, per the Art Newspaper, too avant-garde for the era and quietly shelved. He tried again in 1945 with a small “V” for victory by Philippe Jullian, and the tradition stuck: a different artist every year, each given the whole label as a canvas. Cocteau in 1947. Dalí in 1958. Miró, Chagall, Kandinsky, then Picasso in 1973, the year he died. Warhol in 1975. Keith Haring, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, the then Prince of Wales with a watercolour in 2004. The full list reads like the syllabus for a degree.
1945 Philippe Jullian: the V for victory
1958 Salvador Dalí
1973 Pablo Picasso, in the year of his death
1975 Andy Warhol
1988 Keith Haring
1990 Francis Bacon
1993 Balthus, withdrawn in America
2004 HRH the Prince of Wales
2006 Lucian Freud
2010 Jeff Koons
2014 David Hockney
2021 Chiharu Shiota
2023 Joana Vasconcelos
Two details matter for what follows. First, the artists are given no instructions whatsoever; the family chooses them before anyone knows what the vintage is like and hands over complete freedom. Second, the château has form for absorbing trouble. Max Ernst’s 1965 label was rejected and the job handed to his wife, Dorothea Tanning. The family pursued Balthus for years, commissioned his wife Setsuko for 1991 to soften him up, finally got a drawing for 1993, and then had to withdraw it from the United States after a complaint about the nude, shipping American bottles with a blank space where the art should be. Both versions are now collected, and the withdrawn one is worth more. Hold that thought. It is the whole plot.
Then imagine Banksy gets the phone call
Here is where it stops being history. Imagine the family, having done Koons and Richter and a king, decides the list needs the one name on earth that would make the announcement itself a news story. Imagine a discreet approach through whatever channels reach a man who does not exist on paper. And imagine, for the sake of the exercise, that he says yes. The interesting question is not whether he would accept. It is what “yes” would look like from an artist who once sold canvases from a stall in Central Park for sixty dollars each to prove a point about value, and who shredded a million-pound painting in the middle of a Sotheby’s sale to prove another.
He is definitely not coming to a boardroom
Every other Mouton artist has, at some point, handed over a piece of work. There is a moment where the family sees it, and a moment where the label is made. Banksy’s entire method is the removal of that moment: the work appears, complete, and the institution finds out afterwards. So the first thing to discard is any version involving a sketch, an approval, a launch meeting or a photograph of anyone shaking hands in Pauillac. There would be no meeting. There would be, at most, an outcome.
Most Mouton artists submit artwork. Banksy would submit a crime scene.
Four ways it could go
Scenario One
The midnight intervention
Imagine the château gives him access to the estate and tells nobody but one senior person. At three in the morning a black van arrives in Pauillac. By sunrise there is a stencil on the wall of the vat room, perhaps a ram, the estate’s emblem, with its fleece being sheared into banknotes, and a small note pinned beneath it reading “for the bottle.” No sketches. No approval. No launch. Security footage that mysteriously shows nothing useful. Mouton then has to decide whether the act itself is the commission, and whether the label becomes a photograph of a wall the artist may or may not have personally touched. Collectors would spend years arguing about whether he was ever actually there, which is, of course, the point.
Scenario Two
He never sets foot in Bordeaux at all
Honestly the more believable version. A package arrives at the château. Inside is a single small piece of paper. A rat standing on a wine bottle. A billionaire pouring Lafite down a drain. A vineyard worker pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash. A wine critic holding up a scorecard while somebody quietly steals his glass. No explanation, no invoice, no press release. Just the word. The family then spends six months trying to establish whether it is genuine, which for a house that once had to prove a Balthus was a Balthus would be a familiar kind of misery, and which for the rest of us would be the best story in wine that year.
Scenario Three
He goes after the idea of luxury wine itself
This is the one I would pick if I were him, and the one that would make Mouton nervous. Banksy does not make things beautiful about institutions; he makes institutions look at themselves. So picture the label: a waiter in white gloves pouring Mouton into a crystal glass, while under the table a vineyard worker drinks from a chipped mug. Or a billionaire holding a bottle priced £5,000 while behind him somebody paints over the last three zeros. The tradition is supposed to be about art meeting wine. His version would ask the question I keep asking in a less elegant way: who decided either of these things should cost this much? And Mouton, to its enormous credit, would probably print it, because that is what complete creative freedom means, and because the Balthus taught them that a scandal on the label is money in the cellar.
Scenario Four
The label is the stunt
The strongest version, and the most cruel. The bottle looks completely normal. People buy it, at whatever a first growth costs by then. Then somebody discovers that the official label is a top layer, and underneath it is a second image that can only be seen by peeling the first one off, which immediately and irreversibly damages the collectible bottle. Or every hundredth bottle carries something different. Or the image changes as wine stains it. Collectors would have a nervous breakdown in real time: do you preserve your £1,000 bottle, or destroy part of it to see the Banksy underneath? That is not a wine label. That is a hostage situation with a cork in it.
And then the auction
Because this is Banksy, something would have to go wrong at the sale, and I mean that as the highest praise. Imagine Sotheby’s offers the first jeroboam. The bidding climbs past half a million. The hammer falls. And the label begins, very slowly, to peel itself off the bottle, or a mechanism inside the presentation case draws it through a tiny slot and shreds the bottom half, while a room full of people in good tailoring remembers October 2018, when Girl with Balloon ate itself moments after selling for just over a million pounds, was renamed Love is in the Bin, and sold again three years later for £18.6 million. The damaged jeroboam would, naturally, be worth more than the intact one. It would be the most Banksy thing imaginable and, if you have followed the Balthus story, the most Mouton thing too.
The half-destroyed bottle would be worth more. That is not a paradox. In this market, it is the business model.
Why a Banksy Mouton would be the most collectible Mouton ever
Here is the part that is not really a joke. The most valuable Mouton labels are not the prettiest. They are the ones with a story attached: the Picasso because he died that year, the Balthus because it was banned, the 1953 and 1977 and 2000 and 2003 because they broke the pattern by having no artist at all. Scarcity and narrative are what collectors actually pay for, which is the same engine I keep finding in whisky and the same reason seventeen bottles from 1931 are worth more than a warehouse of the good stuff. A Banksy label would be the story to end all stories: was he there, is it real, which version do you own, did you peel it. Every bottle would arrive with its own argument.
It would also do something the tradition has never quite managed, which is to reach people who have never bought a first growth and never will. The generation the wine trade keeps saying it cannot reach knows exactly who Banksy is and has no idea what Pauillac is. For one vintage, the most expensive wine in the world would be the most talked-about object in the world, and the conversation would be about value, status and who gets to decide, which is, if you think about it, what Baron Philippe was asking in 1924 when he put a poster artist on a bottle and the trade told him he had gone too far.
And there is a warning buried in the fantasy, for the château and for anyone tempted to buy the bottle. A label that is worth more than the wine is a label that will be faked, and the people who fake it will be better at it than the people checking. The Rudy Kurniawan case happened with ordinary labels. Imagine the forgeries when the label itself is the artwork.
Would he actually do it?
Probably not, and the reason is instructive. Banksy has spent thirty years refusing to be owned by the institutions he works on, and Mouton is the most elegant form of ownership there is: your work, their bottle, their name in larger type. On the other hand he shredded a painting inside Sotheby’s, sold in their room, on their terms, and made them complicit in the joke. So the honest answer is that the only version worth imagining is the one where he says yes precisely in order to make the institution the punchline, and where the institution, being cleverer and older than most people give it credit for, lets him. Mouton has printed a nude that got banned, a king’s watercolour and a Koons. It might be the only winery on earth where Banksy would not even be the most disruptive artist they have put on a bottle.
The last word
None of this is going to happen. Mouton will announce another serious artist for another serious vintage, the label will be lovely, and the bottles will go into the cellars of people who will not open them. Which is fine; it is a beautiful tradition and it does not need me. But somewhere in the gap between a poster artist in 1924 and a stencil on a vat-room wall at three in the morning is the whole argument about what wine is for, and who it is for, and why a rectangle of paper can be worth more than what it is stuck to. Banksy would not answer that question. He would just make it impossible to ignore.
The only problem would be working out whether to drink it, frame it, auction it, or wait for the label to destroy itself.
If you would rather drink something than argue about it, the wines that win my blind tastings cost less than the corkage on a Mouton, and if you do own one, store it properly. The label will outlast you either way.
