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Château Siran pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth for 2022 vintage

20 December 2024 By Arabella Mileham

Margaux’s Château Siran has unveiled the label for the 2022 vintage, a work that pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth II by contemporary English artist Damian Elwes.

The label for the 2022 vintage marks a “double tribute” to the UK’s longest reigning monarch, as it was the year that marked her Platinum Jubilee in June, followed by her death in September that year.

Édouard Miailhe, general manager of Château Siran, and a member of the sixth generation of the family, commissioned English artist Damian Elwes, who is known for his work on the creative process of artists, to create the labels for the 2022 vintage.

Elwes, grew up overlooking the Windsor estate, and the painting for this year’s vintage, ‘Sunlight on the Thames near Windsor’, is inspired by his memories of the castle and the river that flower through the town and countryside nearby.

“Every time I drove home, I would look up to see the castle and sometimes the sunlight on the river,” he said.

The vibrant sunlight on the Thames is combined to the famous profile of Elizabeth II that appears on banknotes, stamps and coinage, which was inspired by a portrait by renowned photographer Cecil Beaton.

Elwes is a third-generation artist from a well-known English recusant family (his father Dominick was a painter, as was his grandfather Simon, a war artist and society painter who was reputed to be a favourite of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother) and brother of actor Cary Elwes (most famous as the hero of fantasy adventure classic, The Princess Bride).

With studios in Los Angeles and the Colombian rainforest, his paintings explore themes such as the cycle of life and creativity, and feature in prestigious collections, including the Louvre, the Marciano Foundation in Los Angeles, the Delacroix Museum in Paris, and the Fubon Art Foundation in Taipei. His style is vibrant and expressive, with a freshness and immediacy that captures the atmosphere of painters such as Picasso and Matisse.

The 2022 vintage label is the latest commission in a series of artworks that was started by Édouard Miailhe’s parents in 1980 and commemorates a significant event or trend of the year. It has featured work by artists such as Ben, Folon, and Zao Wou-Ki and although there was a 15 year interruption between 2005-2029, the tradition was revived with the 2020 vintage label by Franco-Chilean artist Federica Matta as “an antidote to Covid”. This was followed by Franco-American contemporary artist and sculptor, Peter Soriano for the 2021 vintage.

“The works give each bottle a particular dimension. They create a vibrant collection while anchoring the vintages in their context,” Miailhe said.

Château Siran comprises 25 hectares in a single block of siliceous gravel in Margaux set amid a 88hectares estates. Owned by the Miailhe family since 1859, the estate has had a sustainable approach to viticulture for more than 20 years and since 2018, several plots have been farmed organically.

db‘s Bordeaux correspondent Colin Hay called the 2022 vintage a wine that “exudes class“, and “as refined a wine as I have ever tasted here“, It was, he added “beautiful on the nose with one of the most intensely floral of the aromatic profiles of the appellation”, and one of a quintet of wines that expressed “the fabulous aromatic floral diversity of the Margaux appellation in this vintage”, naming it as one of his great value picks of the appellation.