Christie’s Will Sell a Huge Bottle of Bubbly Signed by Hirst and Emin

The artist-decorated Nebuchadnezzar benefiting Turner Contemporary.
Courtesy Christie's.

The biggest bottle of English sparkling wine ever produced is headed to auction, with proceeds from the sale benefiting Margate art center Turner Contemporary, and to sweeten the pot hometown hero Tracey Emin enlisted her famous artist friends to sketch on the bottle.

The 15-litre (507 ounces) bottle, which contains the prize-winning 2007 Blanc de Blancs from Kent’s Chapel Down winery, features signatures and drawings from Emin, Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, and Edmund de Waal. It is slated to be included in Christie’s “Out of the Ordinary” sale on September 3 in London. Money from the auction will go to boost Turner Contemporary’s endowment fund.

The enormous bottle, which weighs a whopping 26 kilos (57 pounds) and contains enough sparkling wine to fill 120 glasses, is known as a Nebuchadnezzar. In addition to signing the mammoth vino vessel, each artist also added a small drawing riffing on their trademark subject matter, from a rudimentary shark drawn by Hirst and a self-portrait by Emin to the outline of a male figure by Gormley and a list of previous exhibitions from De Waal.

The blue-chip bottle will be on view at Christie’s South Kensington beginning August 5. It has been pegged with a pre-sale estimate of ÂŁ10,000–15,000 ($17,000–25,700).


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