Vintage Favram Eclair 🍷 Color Litho Wine Neck Label NOS Eagle Wax Seal Crest

Why Is a Wine Label Named for Lightning? 🍷 The Favram Eclair Collerette Neck Label

Size: 3" x 1 1/2"

Éclair is the French word for a flash of lightning, and Vin Eclair was a wine bottled in Belgium. This little crescent is its neck label, the piece the Champagne trade calls a collerette, the curved band that sits at the base of a bottle's foil, and it is new old stock: never applied to a bottle.

🔍 What Is Printed on It

The matching body label for this wine survives too, and it fills in the story. It reads Vin Sélectionné Corsé, FAVRAM, Vin d'Origine titrant 12°, VIN ECLAIR, with a 70 cl bottle size and, in small print, R. C. Courtrai 11303. That last line is a Belgian commercial-register number from the court at Courtrai, the French name for Kortrijk in West Flanders, so the firm behind Favram was Belgian. Belgium opened that register in 1927 and kept it until 2003, and a number as low as 11303 sits below the ones printed on Courtrai invoices from 1936, which suggests the firm was on the register by the mid-1930s. Corsé, with its accent, means full-bodied; more than one dealer has read it as Corsica, but it's the wine, not the island.

Beside the red seal, in tiny letters following the curve, is the printer's number, G. J. 6607. The body label is G. J. 6601, so the two were printed as a matched set from one numbered series.

So when was it printed? Some time between the late 1920s and 1988. From May 1988 European wine labels had to give their strength as "% vol", and this set still says titrant 12°, the old way. American dealers who have sold other labels from the same Courtrai lots call them 1950s, and that's my best guess for this one too.

The back is plain and unprinted.

🥂 The Collerette: A Scarf for a Bottle

The dressed-up bottle is a Champagne invention. The labeling now traditional in Champagne took shape in the 19th century, when the houses wanted a presentation as special as the wine. The neck band label, the collerette (also called a cravat), was a deliberate nod to the scarves, ribbons and neck decorations fashionable at the time. It sits at the base of the foil capsule, and it usually carries the house name or emblem, sometimes the year of founding, and on a vintage wine the vintage year. The foil sleeve above it began as a practical cover, hiding any trace of sediment left in the neck after disgorgement.

A collerette like this one does exactly that job of dressing the neck, with a name and an emblem and nothing more. The crescent is cut to follow the curve where the neck meets the shoulder, which is why the label looks like a smile laid flat.

🔴 The Wax Seal and the Eagle

Before printed capsules, a bottle's cork was often protected with a dip of sealing wax, and a maker could press a mark into it. A label printer who draws a red wax seal onto paper is borrowing that old look of a bottle sealed by hand. The eagle inside is one of the oldest emblems of power in Europe, going back to the aquila standards of the Roman legions and carried forward on coats of arms ever since. Here it is shown with a single head, wings raised, blades crossed beneath. I like that it has just the one head, because that is the older form of the emperors' eagle. In the 1100s Frederick Barbarossa popularized the eagle as the emblem of the Holy Roman Empire, flying it on his banners and striking it on his coins, and through the Middle Ages the emperors' eagle usually had one head. The two-headed imperial eagle most people picture came later: the last Byzantine emperors took it up as their emblem, the Holy Roman Emperors carried it after Sigismund was crowned in 1433 (one head was left to the King of the Romans), and Moscow's rulers adopted it after Ivan III married the last Byzantine emperor's niece in 1472.

🖨️ How Labels Like This Got Their Color

Colorful printed wine labels exist because of lithography. Alois Senefelder invented the process in Bavaria in 1796, printing from a flat stone with grease and water instead of from carved type, and over the following century color lithography made it possible to print bright, detailed labels cheaply and in quantity. The wine label grew up with it. On a label only three inches wide, every color had to land in register with the next.

⭐ The Legend of "Drinking the Stars"

No story is more tied to Champagne's bottles than the one about the monk Dom Pérignon, who supposedly tasted his first sparkling wine and cried, "Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!" Legend has it he said it in 1693. It is a legend and nothing more. The account crediting Pérignon with inventing Champagne first appeared in print around the 1820s, written by Dom Groussard, one of his successors at the abbey of Hautvillers, and the famous line turns up in a champagne advertisement late in the nineteenth century. In reality Pérignon spent much of his working life trying to get rid of the bubbles. The story sold a great deal of wine anyway, which is exactly what a neck label is for.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🍷 Float-mount it on a dark mat so the crescent shape and gold border stand out.
• 🥂 Add it to a bar cart or wine room frame with corks, foils and other labels.
• 📚 Sleeve it with a collection of wine and spirits labels.
• 🎁 Tuck it into a card for a wine lover, a Francophile, or anyone who has ever toasted with sparkling wine.

❓ Questions People Ask

What is a collerette on a wine bottle?

A sickle-shaped band that wraps a bottle just below the capsule, handed down from 19th-century Champagne. Most name the producer or show its emblem.

What does "Eclair" mean?

Lightning. In French an éclair is a sudden flash of it, and the word later became the name of the pastry too.

Has this label been used?

No. The label is unused and its back is clean.

What is the emblem on the red seal?

An eagle with one head, wings raised, printed in silver-gray inside the ring of the seal design.

What does G. J. 6607 mean on the label?

It's the printer's design number. The matching body label from the same set is G. J. 6601.

How big is it?

3" x 1 1/2" ~