Veuve Clicquot collaborates with Yayoi Kusama, who puts her spin on the 2012 La Grande Dame.
Veuve Clicquot collaborates with Yayoi Kusama, who puts her spin on the 2012 La Grande Dame.
The limited edition bottle holder is also a sculpture.
With all of us needing a decent dose of cheer, good news comes in the form of two joy-inducing elements that have come together at the right time: Yayoi Kusama’s technicolour art and Champagne. Specifically, the 2012 vintage of Veuve Clicquot’s prestige cuvee, La Grande Dame.
Also known as “the princess of polka dots”, Kusama has lent her signature polka dots to the label and case of the La Grande Dame 2012. The packaging also features a flower design that recalls Kusama’s 2009 series, Flowers that Bloom at Midnight.
Yayoi Kusama poses with the 2012 La Grande Dame.
For collectors of both art and vintage Champagne, a limited-edition bottle holder and sculpture, also designed by Kusama, cradles a magnum of the La Grande Dame. Only 100 numbered pieces of the sculpture, titled My Heart That Blooms in the Darkness of Night, are available worldwide.
Meanwhile, the Champagne itself is an exceptional expression of the house – with a blend dominant with finicky but commensurately rewarding pinot noir that’s amplified by the 10 per cent of chardonnay from Avize Grand Cru and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger in the Cote des Blancs area. The resultant wine is one for the cellars: white flowers and fruits, marked by complexity, “liveliness, and tension”.
THE ART OF BUBBLY
Champagne houses have a long history of collaborating with the world’s foremost artists and designers. Taittinger worked with legendary pop artist, the late Roy Lichtenstein for its 1985 Brut Millesime. More recently, Ruinart partnered British artist David Shrigley for a series of artworks inspired by its bubbly.
