Did Ch. Mouton Rothschild really have to relabel their 1993s?

In the American market, yes; in the rest of the world, no.

Château Mouton Rothschild has commissioned works for their labels since the 1945 vintage, and the list of artists reads like a Who’s Who of Twentieth-Century painters: Picasso (’73); Warhol (’75); Dalí (’58); Miró (’69); Cocteau (’47); Braque (’55); Kandinsky (’71); Bacon (’90); and even the then Prince of Wales and now King of England, Charles (’04). Balthus has always been a little provocative, but the label for the ’93 vintage (see photo) is hardly salacious. Nevertheless, under pressure from distributors, Mouton was forced to withdraw it and go through the expensive process of relabeling all their bottles bound for the US market with the artwork removed.

This is best understood as an artifact of the chronic Puritan-based wariness-of-women strain that has been an aspect of the American character since Cotton Mather and the Salem witch trials—something still evident in our own troubled times.

This prudishness does not extend to New York City: the Met successfully organized and hosted a major Balthus retrospective in 2013.

An interesting epilog: lithographic reproductions of the ’93 label now sell for many hundreds of dollars—that is, for far more than the original bottle with the wine did.