Courtesy Château Mouton Rothschild

Record-setter Lucian Freud's newest work is more affordable.

Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Lucian Freud Joan Miro Francis Bacon Ilya Kabakov Emilia Kabakov Georg Baselitz

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The wine industry has been corporatized and globalized as much as any other. But there’s one estate where the shots are still called by a single person at a family-owned shop: Château Mouton Rothschild, a member of wine’s most exclusive club, the five "first growths" of Bordeaux.

Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, now in her early 70s, has been running the show at Mouton since 1988. She doesn’t make the wine, but she makes the winery’s most visible decision. Each year she chooses an artist to create an original label for the bottle of the grand vin, the estate’s premier product. The tradition began in 1945 when her father, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, celebrated the Allied victory in World War II by designing the label himself with an elegant V, and it has been carried on ever since, with Bacon, Picasso, and Warhol among those contributing designs.

The label series has no parallel in the wine world. It is a grand cultural experiment and evidence of one family’s pride — as well as an example of using fine art to market luxury goods. This year, Rothschild picked a painter of unparalleled power, both on the canvas and in the marketplace: Lucian Freud, who earned the distinction last May of being the most expensive living artist when his Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) sold for $33.6 million at Christie’s New York. No, there isn’t a mountain of ungainly flesh on the label of the latest Mouton release — the 2006 (high-end red Bordeaux is always aged before it’s sold). Instead, a colorful zebra is poking his head in from the right toward a potted palm. The label was unveiled and the wine officially released (it runs about $500 per bottle) in late February at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami, in conjunction with an exhibition of all the original designs, running through March 8 at the Wolfsonian and Florida International University.

"What Lucian did was so smart," says the baroness, an effusive former actress, from her home in Paris. "He knew he couldn’t have a naked lady on the label of Mouton! His signature style wouldn’t work in this case. So he simplified." The zebra could be Freud’s far-fetched riff on the heraldic motif of two rams butting heads that was introduced by Rothschild’s father and continued by other artists.

As marketing goes, the process of picking the designer is decidedly old school. "There’s no real organization to it — I choose artists that I like," says Rothschild, a collector of Picasso and Pierre Alechinsky, among others. She doesn’t own any Freuds, but the 86-year-old artist is a friend of her cousin Eric, also the proprietor of a first growth: Château Lafite Rothschild. So arranging his participation was easy.

Not that she lacks for options for her grand project. "I get hundreds of artists every year saying they want to do the label," Rothschild says. "But they’re usually not well known enough or not talented enough."

Does the program translate into increased value for the wine? Probably not significantly. Peter Meltzer, Wine Spectator’s auction correspondent, says that according to the magazine’s Auction Index, Château Mouton Rothschild commands extraordinary prices in celebrated vintages such as 1945 ($8,138 per bottle on average), 1959 ($1,564 per bottle), 1982 ($825 per bottle), and 1986 ($625 per bottle). But the 1959 would be spectacular without Richard Lippold’s starburst artwork, and Rothschild is the first to say that this is one book that shouldn’t be judged by its cover. "The bottom line is that the only thing that matters is what’s inside the bottle," she says. "If the wine is bad, the label means nothing."

In the lesser vintages, however, the images can make a difference, according to Jamie Ritchie, the head of North American wine sales at Sotheby’s. "People will often buy a wine just so they can have a complete set of labels," he says. Indeed, many high-end collectors prize "vertical" sets of Mouton bottles — one from each year.