Toast the Revolution
To celebrate tomorrow’s 229th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille (a turning point in the French Revolution), consider popping open the most beautiful Champagne bottle ever designed—Perrier-Jouët’s Art Nouveau-style “flower bottle.” The bottle, decorated with enameled anemones, was first designed in 1902 by glassmaker Emile Gallé as an homage to La Belle Époque (the artistic period from the late 1800s to 1914). However, due to the difficulty making them, the bottles were soon abandoned. In the early 1960s, Pierre Ernst, former president of Perrier-Jouët, found an enamel specialist who could manufacture the bottles en masse. The modern version of the flower bottle premiered in 1969 and held the 1964 vintage of the House’s prestige cuvee called Belle Epoque. In 2012, a hundred years after its creation, the famous flower bottle was updated by Japanese floral designer Makoto Azuma, who added golden vines and delicate dotted flowers to the classic pattern.
