Antique French Wine Neck Label 🍷 1920s Black & Orange Four-Star Design | New Old Stock

Four-Star Wine Bottle Neck Label 🍷 Black, Copper and Red, Unused

Size: 3 1/2" x 1 1/4"

Four red six-pointed stars in a white circle, set in a black band with a feathery copper-orange edge and long white lozenges - a little die-cut collar label for the neck of a bottle, never used. There's not a single word printed on it, front or back, so it's all about the design, and it's a sharp one. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

⭐ What the Stars Meant

Stars on a bottle were a grade mark. Maurice Hennessy brought in star grades for cognac in 1865, the rest of the brandy trade followed, and the stars spread to armagnac, calvados and even rum - the more stars, the better the stuff. A neck label like this, what the French trade calls a collerette, was the little band that announced the grade while the main label below carried the maker's name, and printers sold ready-made designs to any bottler who needed one. That's why this one never needed words. On a wine bottle the collerette most often carried the vintage year, and the Champagne houses, whose dressed-up bottles go back to the 1800s, say the decorative neck band was a nod to the scarves and other neck finery so popular with their forebears.

🥃 How the Stars Grew Up

Maurice Hennessy came up with the star classification for cognac in 1865, and his rival Martell took it up right away. In the 1860s Hennessy marked its bottles with a little shield at the neck carrying one, two or three stars - right where a band like this one sits. In 1868 three stars meant a brandy ten years old. By 1906 it meant at least twelve, and by the middle of the twentieth century only about six. The system never had the force of law behind it, and by the 1970s the one- and two-star grades had faded out and three stars gave way to the letters VS that you see on cognac today.

The stars traveled, too. Pedro Fernández got interested in brandy and cognac while he was studying engineering in France in the mid-1860s, and when he started selling rum in Puerto Rico in 1880 he brought the French brandy makers' habit of grading with stars home with him: the rum that started it all is known today as Ron del Barrilito Tres Estrellas, Three Stars.

🖨️ Bought From the Printer's Book

Small bottlers didn't pay an artist for a neck band. Printers put out catalogues of ready-made designs, and a customer just picked one: in Alsace, one wine grower chose model number 641 out of the catalogue for 8 francs, and the little motifs went for 2 to 5 francs apiece. The French called these all-purpose labels passe-partout - cheap, good for almost anything, and slow to go out of style. A star band with no name on it is exactly that kind of label, made to go on whatever bottle needed a grade.

Fun framed small, or tucked into a bar display with other old labels.