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The greenish bottle, on display in the display case, on the wall of an old brick cellar, looks like a miserable wreck that ended up there by mistake. Looking closer, the date imprinted on the glass is 1787: two years before the French Revolution. When that Bordeaux was bottled, Louis XVI, the last king of France, was still firmly on the throne; Europe still in full Ancien Regime; Napoleon a stranger; the first steam engine had just been invented by the Englishman James Watt; electricity did not exist and all of humanity moved only on horseback. Under the date we read “Thomas Jefferson”: the bottle of Château Lafite belonged to the third American president, one of the first wine collectors of the modern era, who paid 75 dollars back then to buy it.
The home of the Rothschild barons
The priceless oenological piece is just one of the countless treasures enclosed in Waddesdon Manor, a palace in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Next to what is perhaps the oldest bottle of wine in the world, there is a more recent magnum: the year is 1993. It almost makes you smile, compared to its secular neighbor, but it has three handwritten names on the label: Elizabeth II, Philip and Diana. Namely the former Queen of England, her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Princess of Wales: none of them are alive and this makes the bottle even more precious.
The Waddesdon Manor cellar collects 15,000 bottles of Château Lafite, the personal reserve of the owner family, as well as owner of the renowned winery. An hour by train from London, this French-looking residence is reputed to be the most beautiful country house in all of England. It is also the residence of the Rothschild family, the famous and extremely wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish banking family originally from Frankfurt. To this day, Lord Jacob Nathaniel Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, a gracious elderly gentleman of 87, lives there on the neighboring Eithorpe estate, after the family transformed Waddesdon into a charming museum and resort town. The ticket costs 13 pounds (reduced to 6.6 for children).
Waddesdon Manor, a dream home in the English countryside
Photogallery 11 photos
A fairytale estate
Moreover, defining it as a “country house” is absolutely reductive. From the entrance, a seemingly endless road climbs up various hairpin bends. Scattered along the way are huge stables and an old dairy. The Stables complex today is a gallery for art exhibitions (at the moment a solo show by the painter Catherine Goodman is on display), with an adjoining restaurant (among other things, the menu includes chicken croissants, bruschetta with salmon and capers and mini meringues). The Dairy, on the other hand, an old dairy where the Rothschild ancestors made butter and cheeses with ceramic labels, is today a place dedicated to events and weddings: crossing the entrance, where a chandelier made with deer antlers stands out, opens a gipsoteca with busts of Pericles and Roman sarcophagi, which overlooks an Arcadian pond between willows and woods. The quintessential British countryside. At the end of the 19th century, the patriarch Ferdinand Rothschild chose this hill and had a country villa built there to spend the summer: the hill was the only one that overlooked the plain below. The truly rich, yesterday as today, love to live high up and dominate from afar. Even today the place is isolated: the only single-track railway reaches only as far as Aylesbury Park, a tiny little station in the middle of the fields. And from there, a private shuttle service is available for visitors, which go back and forth to the estate.
Canaletto, Hockney and Marie Antoinette
The three floors of the mansion, among wood paneling, tapestries and velvets, house a collection of the best art of all time: the most astonishing room is where a recent portrait of Lord Rothschild with his daughter by David Hockney contrasts with an astonishing Tintoretto portraying not typical Venice, but Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. Ancient and modern coexist in sublime contrast. One of the towers houses a hexagonal space with the story of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty painted by the early 20th century Russian artist Leon Bakst, where each character has the face of a member of the family. A very rare ship-shaped perfume diffuser, a typical object of 18th century France, all destroyed after the Revolution as a form of protest, and two luster Renaissance plates by Mastro Giorgio da Gubbiosvettano in the ceramics section. A gigantic jade vase, in the shape of an ancient Greek crater, decorates a minor staircase of the palace: the plate informs that it is a gift given by the Russian Tsar Alexander II to Baron Lionel in 1873. In the fairy-tale opulence of the palace, however, it passes almost unnoticed.
Two colossal Venice-themed paintings by Francesco Guardi decorate the corridor leading to the Baron’s wing, the magnate’s private rooms, inaccessible to mere mortals: the rest was intended to welcome and entertain guests. Above all, a small console stands out: it was the desk of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. Outside the palace, in front of the Italian-style gardens, the latest addition to the already very rich Waddesdon Manor is a wedding cake which will increase the number of weddings on the estate: in fact, a new installation has just been inaugurated next to the Dairy gardens, a ceramic cake 12 meters high and three floors by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, who in the past has already embellished the Dairy with an installation that pays homage to the family wine. The work, open up to the turret where the bride and groom can be immortalized, is made up of 25,000 unique pieces that arrived from Lisbon, which required five years of work, including tiles (reminiscent of Lusitanian azulejos) and decorations that draw from the classical tradition ( mermaids, gorgons and sea creatures). It will also be possible, if desired, to get married inside the cake: the interior is a sort of chapel entirely in yellow ceramic decorated with statues of Sant’Antonio.