Label Conscious

Photo by Mark Mahaney

Donald Sultan emerges from the wine cellar in his Sag Harbor, New York, home.

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Apart from paintings in progress, there’s a lot to catch the eye in Donald Sultan’s spacious, two-level studio in Lower Manhattan. Sitting on the desk of the 57-year-old artist and worldly Southern gentleman is Man Ray’s small photo of his paramour Lee Miller—"You can see how much he loved her," says Sultan. Downstairs, where he maintains a drawing studio and a well-equipped kitchen, eclecticism rules: A Mathew Brady photo of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the wall just down the hall from a pair of Laurent de Brunhoff’s drawings of Babar at the beach. A Cy Twombly drawingis casually propped up on a work table opposite a gilt-framed Hudson River landscape by George Inness. Everywhere are Sultan’s own paintings of his trade mark subjects: fruits and flowers, in mediums ranging from the palest watercolor to the blackest tar.

Sultan is also a wine lover and collector with French-leaning tastes who over the course of 20 years has amassed several hundred top-tier bottles. In the New York studio, his passion for the grape is mostly out of sight. A small number of intriguing bottles are kept in a thick-doored closet, selected for ready delectation from his main stash, in a former root cellar beneath his summer home in Sag Harbor, on Long Island’s South Fork.

Hefting a magnum of 1983 Dom Pérignon, one of that difficult vintage’s greatest successes in Champagne, he says,"I really should open this for someone.” Next to the big bubbly is a bottle of 1989 amber-toned Château d’Yquem, the world’s finest dessert wine. “It’ll go great with foie gras or blue cheese and a ripe pear,” he says. “A really great wine doesn’t need dinner."

He points to the label of a bottle of Château Clerc-Milon from the 1982 vintage, one of the most sought-after Bordeaux years of the 20th century.“Dalí did that,” he says of the golden image of a woman morphing into a wine goblet. Clerc-Milon is owned by the Rothschilds, who famously commission a different artist every year to design their Château Mouton-Rothschild label.

Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, Sultan was nurtured in art by his father, a tire dealer and would-be painter. Love of wine had to wait until the 1980s, when Sultan, then in his early 30s, first sojourned in Saint-Tropez. For a time, he rented a villa that had belonged to the Impressionist painter Paul Signac, who helped transform the sleepy fishing port into a painters’ hangout. "I’d go up to the winery at Sainte Roseline, in the hills over Saint-Tropez, to buy its terrific rosé,” Sultan says. “The chapel there was where the wife of the Parisian art dealer Aimé Maeght prayed to be cured of cancer. When she got better, she had Giacometti design the altar and Chagall do a window and Balenciaga do the fabrics. I was doing well with my work, and I was buying a lot of wine. Saint-Tropez was not exactly populated by a bunch of buffoons, so you could buy very good stuff."

To acquire the "very good stuff," Sultan doesn’t always have to pay cash—he can barter for it. In a memorable transaction in the early 1990s, he swapped two charcoal drawings of flowers (current value, $20,000 each) to Lawrence Rubin, then the director of Knoedler Gallery, for a trove of elite Bordeaux and Burgundies, including a case of magnums of a Burgundian immortal, La Tâche 1969 from the Domainede la Romanée-Conti (current auction value, $72,000 per case). Sultan may have gotten the better deal: Very little remains of the 1969 La Tâche, while the artist continues to be productive.

In the same trade, Sultan also got two jeroboams (equal to six regular bottles) of the classic Château Margaux 1978, which he still owns. And in a transaction in the mid-1990s, he received a store of another long-lived Bordeaux, Château Lynch-Bages, a Pauillac from the stellar 1990 vintage, in partial payment for a painting of grapes and pears purchased by the Cazes family, owners of the estate. Sultan has put away a case of Château Clerc-Milon 1982—another long lived Pauillac—for the day when his son, Penn, now 20, gets married. His daughter Frances, 28, has just begun to dig in to a case of a Château Trotenoy 1982, a Pomerol classic that her father reserved for her long ago.