Heritage champagne brand Pol Roger has teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover to create a unique Land Rover Defender with a very special purpose. The bespoke vehicle will be used to transport Pol Roger’s fine wines and spirits to prestigious events and, as such, includes a raft of innovative design features including a pop-up bar with roll-out canvas cover and safari-inspired furniture created by Holland & Holland.
Built by Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations department, one key influence was Riva’s speedboats, the iconic teak decking of which has been used to upholster the Defender’s utility-style rear bench seating and floor.
The driver’s portion of the Defender features more luxurious leather upholstery along with vintage map detailing to the chairs and dashboard, depicting both Pol Roger’s home in Champagne and Land Rover’s origins in the West Midlands. Two years in the making, this bespoke vehicle will be one of the last Defenders created; Jaguar Land Rover are due to stop production in December 2015 when new EU laws on fuel emissions come in to effect.
“We worked on a truly adventurous brief which stretched both Holland and Holland and Land Rover to their full capacity in terms of both engineering and design,” said a Pol roger spokesperson of the project. “We believe the concept is very special; it is unique in its design and simply cannot be bought from a dealer or ‘off the peg’. Once we decided to look at a project involving the Defender, Land Rover immediately grasped what the concept should encompass, taking into account Pol Roger’s integral values.”
The Pol Roger Land Rover Defender will make its debut in September at the Burghley Horse Trials, of which Pol Roger and Land Rover are both official sponsors.