WINE MUSEUM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 June 1939, Page 2

WINE MUSEUM

OPENED IN FRENCH TOWN. The opening of the Wine Museum of Beziers, the wine capital of'France, will be among the most pleasant duties that M. Albert Lebrun, President of the French Republic, will perform in his official capacity during 1939. Beziers, in the Lenguedoc, produces more wine than all the rest of France, and no place could be better suited for a wine museum. Wine, almost as much sung about as love, goes back far into antiquity, and in the new museum its origins will be recalled by the earliest representations of the vine in art. A model of a Gallo-Roman wine shop will be shown, with much pottery that, wine-filled, caused the vintner’s shoulder knots to groan in days of long ago, and cups and goblets that found their way from Greece and Rome to Gaul will invoke libations in honour of Bacchus. A bronze statuette, discovered during excavations at Beziers, will amuse by its unsteady attitude and satisfied expression.

Engravings and pictures of the cultivation of the vine through the centuries will be exhibited, and a series of documents- dating from the seventeenth century relating to conditions of labour in the vineyards have an extremely modern touch of trade-union-ism about them. A number of old orders for wine will be shown—King John of England used to order his wine sent from France —and a notable part of the wine museum will be devoted to a collection of old copies of songs about wine that would have delighted the heart of a G. K. Chesterton.