How do you celebrate a colour? When it’s yellow and represents the colours of the world’s most luxurious and chic champagne – the eponymous Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Yellow Label – the possibilities are enormous. For starters, the colour is associated with everything that involves the champagne. If for example, you are privileged enough to be invited to stay at Hotel du Marc, the 19th century mansion owned by Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, the company that makes the champagne in the French city of Reims, the yellow is hard to miss. Every room even has a small little novel called Madame Clicquot based on the inspiring life of Madame Barbe Clicquot Ponsardin, the widow who transformed the champagne after her husband’s death in the early 19th century, into the epitome of worldwide luxury. The cover of the book, of course, is a distinct yellow-orange. You will also see another book in the room called Veuve Clicquot Yellow, by French art critic and writer Elisabeth Vedrenne, which is devoted entirely to extolling the virtues of yellow as a colour and its significance to people around the world.

‘It is a colour that captures feeling, rare emotions and a sense of well-being,’ Vedrenne says, ‘Yves Saint Laurent sent his tangerine and nasturtium silks swaying cheek to cheek. Emilio Pucci coloured his dresses in fluid geometries of light orange and pale pink, giving women devastating self-confidence…. Rothko conjured away his dark and tortured moods with squares of yellow…Yellow is the most earthly colour, wrote the painter Kandinsky… In the Asian world, yellow and orange are everywhere, from taste buds to the edge of the eyes. From the setting of the sun to the break of dawn. In the fields, saris bellow in the wind in the symphonies of saffron, curry papayas, amber mustard, pulpy orange… Further north near the Himalayas, the Buddhist monks of Tibet live in the beating heart of those colours, which for them are symbols of wisdom and eternity.’

The yellow originally appeared on the Veuve Clicquot bottles in the latter part of the 19th century when it became necessary to distinguish the sweeter champagne favoured by the Russians and northern Europeans whose bottle bore the original white label, from the drier ones preferred by the British and Americans. The first yellow consignments were in pale yellow, the colour of which faded by the time it reached the customers aboard cargo ships. So a decision was made to use the deep yellow-orange colour. In 1877 it was officially registered as the Veuve Clicquot colour with the local authorities, whereby no other champagne manufacturer was allowed to use it. The colour and design of the label has remained unchanged for over 130 years now, providing Veuve Clicquot’s Yellow Label the legendary status it has acquired around the world. “It was entirely incidental,” says Cecile Bonnefond, the president of the House of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, “but we are lucky to have this colour.”

Veuve Clicquot has been part of the French luxury group LVMH since 1987 and Bonnefond, who was named president in 2001, is only the second woman to lead the company after Madame Clicquot herself. She has aggressively moved towards popularising the yellow colour as the company’s distinctive identity. “When I joined Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, I was entranced by the mysterious and paradoxical Veuve Clicquot yellow colour,” she says. “Just when you think you have fully understood and mastered its meaning, you realise there is much more to it. It is a daring, eternal, universal colour, a sign of human joy and divine, the colour of the sun, the hue of beauty and luxury. It is lively, fashionable, young, audacious, edgy and spiritual,” she says in an interview at New York’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, where hundreds of guests from around the world had been flown in recently by her company to ‘dream in yellow and to live the Veuve Clicquot Yellow,’ by being part of a giant celebration called ‘Starlight Yellow’ to honour the 130 year anniversary of the yellow label’s creation.