There are very few happy surprises left in luxury, and one of these was unveiled in the Bourse de Commerce of Bordeaux on the evening of 30 November when the world-renowned wine estate Château Mouton Rothschild held its annual dinner to reveal the latest artist to design a label for its newest vintage. Peter Doig will join the pantheon of artists such as Picasso, Dali, and Warhol, who have created what is ostensibly the smallest work of art to go onto a small-scale wine label.

In what is now a highly anticipated annual tradition, the Rothschild family select the artist and work with them behind the scenes to reveal the artwork that will be transposed on each bottle from the legendary château. This year’s artist was also highly anticipated because the 2020 vintage – with its refined and complex nose of ripe black fruit that opens up to aniseed and other subtle flinty aromas, and the accompanying palate of precise tannins that harmoniously balance mineral and black berry fruit notes, with an exceptionally long finish – will be the final year in a trinity of recent unparalleled and exceptional vintages.

Scottish-born, Trinidad-based Doig is a world-renowned painter, who has had major museum exhibitions including Tate Britain in 2008, Fondation Beyeler in 2015 and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 2020, and an upcoming exhibition in the Courtauld London in 2023. His piece Swamped sold for a record-breaking $39m in Christie’s New York Evening Sale last year.

Doig created an artwork for the 2020 vintage label that celebrates the nocturnal and agrarian aspects of winemaking in a luscious work that references van Gogh and Cézanne. The artwork features a moonlit scene of workers in the vineyard and an enigmatic figure holding a guitar, a personal tribute to the artist’s Trinidadian friend, the artist Embah (Emheyo Bahabba), strumming a nocturnal tune.

The artist said: ‘The painting shows something of what goes on behind the scenes in the production of wine, what happens offstage, as it were. It’s a sort of ode to workers, to all those involved at the various stages of making a wine before it’s finally bottled.’

Today, several wineries and estates may work with artists and designers to create labels. However, Mouton Rothschild was the first estate to systematically commission artists to create labels for its vintages in 1945. The estate had experimented with a designed label in 1924, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild asked the graphic designer Jean Carlu to create a special label for the vintage to commemorate the estate’s new Mise en bouteille au Château. The label is an Art Deco rendering of the Rothschild family crest, delivered in clean, modern lines. The Château had invented a new method of bottling, labelling and storing wine in the cellars on its estate, enabling the family to control quality and fully supervise the production and distribution on the estate, rather than work through merchants. This had never been done before in the history of winemaking, and deserved to be commemorated through graphic art.

In 1955, Georges Braque contacted Mouton Rothschild and asked to create an artwork to go on the label, and this revolutionised the family tradition as other established artists from different styles and practices joined the tradition, including Chagall, Warhol, Bacon, Hockney and Miro. Each annual label is evidence of the spirit of friendship between artist and family, each label, the product of collaboration and shared respect for the tradition of winemaking.

Julien de Beaumarchais de Rothschild, co-owner of the estate and responsible for the cultural activity and relationship to the artists, said of the 2020 vintage artist selection of Doig: ‘We wanted an artist who uses canvas and pictorial material to express figurative subjects.’ The artist was selected because ‘his technique and his universe… [set] them apart in contemporary figurative art. His subjects are very varied, his painting resists any classification: he has succeeded in creating his own, inimitable world.’ A sentiment that clearly also applies to the quality and perfection of Mouton Rothschild first-growth vintages: inimitable and above all other levels of classification.

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