NEWS : Wine’s Label Will Be Bare, but Not Nude : Values: Napa residents object to Balthus drawing on a Mouton ’93 Bordeaux. Winery deletes it for U.S. imports.

For 49 consecutive vintages, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild has commissioned a famous artist to design the upper panel of the label adorning its bottles. There will be no 50th--at least not in the United States.

A petition circulated by a small group of Napa Valley residents complained that the drawing of a young nude girl on the proposed label for the 1993 Bordeaux was inappropriate.

In reaction, the French firm decided to release the wine in the United States--about 4,000 cases--without the drawing. At the top of the label on ’93 Mouton bottles shipped here, the panel will be blank, said George Scheppler, a spokesman for Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA, based in the Napa Valley.

Bottles of Mouton shipped to other world markets, including Canada and Mexico, will have the unexpurgated version of the label with a drawing by the well-known French painter Balthus.

The move took industry observers by surprise, especially because the label was approved for use in the United States by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, an agency known for its conservative approach to label approvals for any design that even remotely could be construed as sexually explicit.

The bureau has rejected labels showing a female nude drawing by David Lance Goines that would have been used on a Cabernet Sauvignon made by Kenwood Vineyards in Sonoma Valley about 20 years ago and, recently, an abstract painting of a male nude by Jean Dubuffet submitted by Clos Pegase Winery in the Napa Valley.

The bureau even rejected a label, used for more than 25 years, by Clos du Val Winery of the Napa Valley that has a line drawing of three muses. That ruling was reversed after an appeal.

The Balthus drawing on the Mouton shows a young girl who appears to be in early adolescence, semi-reclining and nude.

Rebecca Lee, who volunteers at the Child Assault Prevention Program in Napa, was one of half a dozen people who started the grass-roots movement that distributed a petition calling on Mouton to abandon use of the label worldwide. The group calls itself Concerned Adults.

She said the group was upset not only by the drawing but also by the nature of the promotional material that accompanied announcement of the artist’s involvement in the project.

A press kit, distributed two weeks ago and published by some wine magazines, said, in part, “The fragile and mysterious girl . . . seems to hint at some secret promise of undiscovered pleasure, a pleasure to be shared.”

Scheppler said the wording referred to the wine, not to the label drawing.

Lee says that the label clearly hints at exploitation of young girls and that she and the others believed it could be seen as tolerant of child abuse.

“We know the wine industry doesn’t support [child abuse] and we know that wine is a beverage traditionally consumed in the context of family values,” so members went to Napa Valley wineries for support.

“We got 300 signatures in less than three days,” she says.

Scheppler says Mouton owner Baroness Philippine de Rothschild personally approved the label for the ’93 Mouton and also made the decision to withdraw it from the U.S. market when she heard of complaints about it.

“We are grateful that they acted so quickly, so I don’t want to sound ungrateful about that,” says Lee, “but what we’d really like to see is for the label to be dropped around the world too. If you admit that you made a mistake, wouldn’t you pull the label internationally? Or was this a business decision rather than a moral one?”

The absence of an artist on the label would be the first since the tradition began in 1945 with the phrase “Annee de la Victoire” at the top. Among the artists whose works have appeared on Mouton labels are Pablo Picasso (1973) and Marc Chagall (1970).

Miklos Dora of Montecito, Calif., longtime U.S. representative for Mouton (now retired), says an official at the company’s Paris office told him the Balthus label would remain on most bottles, but the company is investigating using another artist for 1993 bottles that come to the United States.