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.

Everything about the celebration stood out, starting with the location. The 52nd floor of the glass and steel building called 7 World Trade Centre, with its unobstructed 360 degree view of New York, was bathed in yellow for the evening. Directly overlooking Ground Zero, it was the first building to be fully constructed after the complex was destroyed on September 11, 2001. “We call Veuve Clicquot the artistocratic champagne because of our long association with art and artist,” Bonnefond says, “in keeping with that tradition we invited a special group of artists to New York and asked them to let their imagination run wild in expressing yellow in their own terms. And where best to organise the event than New York, the art and design capital of the world.” New York, of course, is also among Veuve Clicquot’s biggest and prestigious markets. It has always been a luxury lifestyle brand here.

The artistes invited ranged from musicians to painters, writers, dancers, a chef and a cellar master. And their imagination more than went wild. French illustrator Florence Deygas decorated the panoramic floor to ceiling-plate glass windows of the venue with drawings of major New York landmarks each window overlooked, all in yellow outlines. Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ unique creation featured a room bathed in yellow fog so dense that almost everyone who walked in was blinded for a few seconds by the yellow and taken aback by a complete sense of disorientation. The exhibit was called Lee 204 + Lee 179. The idea, according to the artist, was to make ‘all obstacles, material aspects and contextual resistance disappear’. You had to literally feel your way out of the room. Jay McInerney, author of the quintessential New York novel Bright Lights, Big City, came up with the idea of writing the first page of a short story titled ‘Yellow Story’ with the colour yellow as the establishing element. It was beamed on a big screen and guests were asked to take the story forward. The author, who was hobbling around in crutches, after a recent accident, was impressed by the response. More than a dozen people volunteered to complete the story. “Some of the stuff is pretty good,” he said, “but some I could not understand.” The problem was the language, having come from around the world they chose their own language to complete the story. So what started as an English story ended with a rainbow of languages – Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese and others.

Veuve Clicquot’s cellar master Jacques Peters and his assistant Dominique Demarville took the guests through a tasting journey of the legendary champagne called Yellow Tasting. “It is clearly the Pinot Noir, the king of the grapes which comes from our own vineyards that gives Veuve Clicquot such a consistently good taste,” he told the audience. “Our other big advantage is the huge amount of Reserve Wine in our cellar. We use the highest level of Reserve Wines from our own collection than any other champagne maker in the region, nearly 97 per cent.”

The evening was rounded off with the launch of the Yellowboam, the most precious bottle ever crafted by Veuve Clicquot. The normal champagne bottles contain about 750 ml of the wine, while Magnums contain 1.5 litres. The Jeroboam bottle on the other hand contains three litres. The exclusive Jeroboam launched at the event was christened Yellowboam. Only 3,600 numbered bottles were made, entirely by hand, from the harvesting of its contents to the labelling of the exterior. Instead of the normal paper labels, the Yellowboam boasts of a label made of exotic leather of ray, ostrich and alligator, handcrafted in such a way that it matched the original yellow paper label. Each bottle was also sealed with a foil covered in real 22.4 carat gold and topped with a collectible 24 carat-gold plated muzzle cap engraved with Madame Clicquot’s famous signature. The Yellowboam sets new standards for luxury in the world of champagne.

The Yellowboam was launched to the background of a remarkable performance by the Canadian dancer Christoper Caines and his troupe. Their graceful and energetic waltz against the aptly called Yellow Bar captured the sparkling spirit of both, the champagne and its yellow label. Bonnefond herself summed up the evening best when she said: “These are all the things that make yellow, yellow.”