Charity Auction for Rare Bottles of Vendemmia d’Artista Ornellaia 2020 “La Proporzione” to Begin September 7, 2023

Charity Auction for Rare Bottles of Vendemmia d’Artista Ornellaia 2020 “La Proporzione” to Begin September 7, 2023

Bolgheri wine estate Ornellaia is excited to announce that the annual charity auction of bottles from the 15th edition of Vendemmia d’Artista, organized by Sotheby’s, will return online from September 7 to 21, 2023.

Double magnums, imperials and the only 9-liter Salmanazar will be among the 12 lots. All the bottles are embellished with labels designed by the American artist Joseph Kosuth, who was invited to interpret this edition’s character, namely “La Proporzione” (Proportion).

The auction will provide collectors with the opportunity to secure lots of high artistic and wine significance, while doing a generous gesture. As in previous years since 2019, all profits will go to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s “Mind’s Eye” program, which welcomes and enhances access to the arts for visitors who are blind or have low vision. “We are proud to support this initiative,” comments Giovanni Geddes da Filicaja, CEO of Ornellaia. “Like in art, appreciation of fine wines requires total involvement of the senses. Furthermore, for us, partnering with the Guggenheim Foundation is a way of giving back to the community some of the extraordinary goodwill that nature has bestowed upon us.” These unique bottles are precious for three reasons: their contents, their works of art on the labels and, last but not least, their goal of increasing access to the arts for all visitors.

In 2020, nature and humanity combined to craft a perfect ‘proportion’ of elegance, power and complexity. In order to interpret this correspondence, the leading American conceptual artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth created a set of works based on the word “wine” and a quote from Vitruvius’s De Architectura (3.1.3). The 750ml bottle features the English version of the phrase engraved on the paper. For the 100 double magnums, the etymology of the word “wine” is embossed on the bottle, while each of the unique 10 imperials sees the etymology engraved onto the glass. One branch is accentuated in white and the quote from Vitruvius is translated in the highlighted language or one of its modern descendants: Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Italian, Hindi, Hebrew, Modern Greek, Irish, German and Armenian. For the Salmanazar, the etymology and quote from Vitruvius below are in English, and the highlighting applied to the bottle is in platinum.

Kosuth notes, “I believe that language is an important part of experiencing everything and that these experiences shape us in a certain way linguistically. The architecture of experience through language was obviously always at work and I believe that Vitruvius was a major resource in understanding a concept like proportion. Proportion is not only visible equilibrium among the elements, but also equilibrium of all the elements that make it a perfect entity of what it represents for the world, thus also shaping it as conception.”