Before it Pops

Champagne is the world's most celebrated wine — and the most misunderstood. It is universally associated with celebration, with arrival, with the moment of opening. But the greatest Champagnes are about what comes before: the tension, the precision, the careful accumulation of complexity over years on the lees in chalk cellars beneath Reims and Épernay. The finest Champagnes from Krug, Dom Pérignon, Bollinger and Louis Roederer are not about the pop. They are about everything that preceded it — years of assembly, riddling, disgorging, the slow evolution of yeast and wine in the dark. Before it Pops was built on this understanding: she is the pause between silence and sound. The held breath before everything changes.

Every WiWwaW portrait begins not with a canvas or a lens but with a moodboard — a private, intuitive assembly of words, colours, textures and images that together form the wine's character translated into a woman. The moodboard for Before it Pops travels with the finished work to its collector: a window into the creative process, a second layer of the work itself.