Mission

To serve society by promoting the wine culture of Catalonia and presenting it as a catalyst for sustainable and democratic territorial development, within an institution that is open to the public, accessible, inclusive, and diverse. The institution is dedicated to recovering, preserving, researching, interpreting, and disseminating Catalonia’s wine heritage, offering a variety of experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and the exchange of knowledge.

Objectives

1. To carry out all the activities typical of a museum, that is, the research and collection of all kinds of cultural assets—movable and immovable, material and immaterial—especially those related to Vilafranca del Penedès, the Penedès region, and the wine cultures of Catalonia; to promote their study, conservation, documentation, and exhibition, as well as the dissemination of knowledge for research, education, and intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment.
2. To manage the facilities assigned to the foundation that are intended to carry out the tasks typical of a museum.
3. To organize and host cultural activities related to local history, culture, and heritage, as well as the wine cultures of Catalonia, and to open the facility to debate and reflection on key issues for understanding contemporary society. This should be done in a spirit of collaboration, integration, and co-creation, in order to strengthen the institution’s ties with the social, educational, and cultural fabric of Vilafranca, the Penedès, and Catalonia.
4. To contribute to the promotion of the region. The museum aims to be recognized as a tourist resource that, due to its theme, uniqueness, and scale, becomes strategic in the forums of the main tourism promotion agents of Vilafranca, the Penedès, and Catalonia.

History, in brief

The background

El Niu d’Art (1915–1927), pioneers in the promotion of local culture and heritage; the First Art Exhibition of the Penedès, when Penedès heritage was exhibited for the first time (1926); Martí Grivé led the first archaeological excavations in the region (1930–1935).

The foundation

In August 1935, the Vilafranca Museum was founded with a board chaired by the town’s mayor, Josep Masachs Llorach, and the councillor for culture, the musician Francesc de Paula Bové. They were joined by a large group of intellectuals and prominent local figures.

The first wine museum

The museum hosted Arqueología del vino, the exhibition of the I Feria de la viña y el vino (1943), which ultimately became the origin of the first wine museum founded in Spain (1947).

The Royal Palace of Vilafranca is reborn

The museum’s new historic headquarters began the process of restoring its medieval architectural features. 1940s and 1950s.

The arrival of four major heritage legacies

Pere Mestre Raventós, ornithology (1962); the Pladellorens family, 19th-century Catalan art and furniture (1963); Monsignor Manuel Trens, Catalan art from the first half of the 20th century and liturgical art (1972); and Monsignor Antoni Bonet i Baltà, ceramics (1978).

The museum incorporated the building annexed to the Palace and transformed it into the new exhibition space for the recently acquired collections (1973).

The democratic transition: more cultural spaces for the museum

The Chapel of Sant Pelegrí was incorporated into the museum and renovated as a space for temporary exhibitions (1980). The donation of Casa Amiguet by Josefa Tomàs (1982) enabled the creation of the museum’s new archive space.

In compliance with Law 19/2014, of December 29, on transparency, access to public information, and good governance, and Law 21/2014, of December 29, on the supervision of foundations and verification of the activity of associations declared of public utility, this section publishes the information to make effective the principle of transparency and the obligations regarding active publicity derived from the law.

Bylaws

Governing bodies

Annual reports

Team

Contact us if you want to consult more documentation: emartinez@vinseum.cat

The Vilafranca Museum was established as an association in 1935. From that moment until the first decade of the 21st century, the Vilafranca del Penedès City Council and Caixa Penedès were crucial in the different stages through which this institution has grown, based on the initiative and volunteerism of citizens. These people have been providing the town with a unique space that, through the conservation of the heritage deposited there, reflects and disseminates our culture, while ultimately becoming a reference center.

In 2000, the Vilafranca Museum-Wine Museum needed to establish a new internal structure that would allow it to begin a renovation to adapt to the pace of the 21st century, and it was established as a private foundation.

This change provided the museum with a defined legal structure; it allowed the integration of various social and institutional sectors that traditionally supported the museum; it made it possible to link the private sector thanks to the tax benefits that foundations can offer to their collaborators; it guaranteed unified and professional management of the collections, and it helped to secure stable funding, essential for developing the current VINSEUM project, Museum of the Cultures of Wine of Catalonia.

In 2010, with the disappearance of Caixa Penedès, the City Council assumed the role of the main supporter of the museum project, and since then the foundation has been majority-owned and funded by the local public administration.

Governing bodies

Currently, the foundation is constituted by a board of trustees that governs and represents the institution, and by a board of directors that assumes management together with the director, who develops the established project thanks to a technical team of museologists, an administrative team, and another team of people who handle user services and maintenance.

The president of the board of trustees is the mayor of Vilafranca del Penedès, and the rest of the members are:

The museum works with different networks and entities with which it exchanges viewpoints, resources, and knowledge, whether related to the local environment or the field of work.

Priorities and areas of interest

VINSEUM is a museum specialized in the wine cultures of the entire Catalan region. This is the priority for growth and specialization, in contrast to the rest of the country’s museums.

Broadly speaking, the museum possesses a very diverse heritage in its origin and its relationship with the territory, which encompasses various fields of knowledge, not just that of the vine and wine. In its role as the main entity for managing the heritage of the Penedès region, its growth expectations focus on completing the viticultural ethnological collections, but also with the intention of acquiring collections that help increase knowledge of the history of Vilafranca, primarily, and the Penedès in general.

And it is in these two major transversal thematic axes that the Vilafranca museum allows acquisition proposals that increase non-priority collections such as the art collection, decorative arts collection, general ethnological collection, etc., either because they are elements that refer to wine culture, or because the proposed materials are considered relevant within the history of Vilafranca and the Penedès.

As an example, and in the field of the vine and wine, the museum focuses its attention and interest on the different trades of cooper, glassmaker, barrel maker, corker, and wine carrier, which have accompanied the wine tradition for centuries. One of the ways the museum’s collections grow is precisely in areas that are poorly represented, such as glassmaking, barrel making, corking (corker), or wine carrying.

On the other hand, in the field of ethnology, the museum has no record of Catalan viticultural intangible heritage, nor any record on local themes. One of the possible ways for the museum’s collections to grow is, therefore, the new incorporation of an oral memory records collection. In this regard, it should be noted that the museum’s Documentation Center has a documentary collection where part of this intangible heritage can be represented, although its identification has not been systematized. It should be mentioned that the CDV continues to receive donations, always conditioned to the two major thematic axes: the world of wine and the Penedès region. In this case, acquisitions avoid duplications and are always conditioned to completing open collections such as the local newspaper archive, the Festa Major collection, the Musical Archive, or the bibliographic and documentary collection of wine.

The art collection is one of the museum’s most outstanding collections, after wine ethnology and archaeology. However, it is a collection largely made up of major donations such as the legacy of Monsignor Manuel Trens, that of the Pladellorens family, or the ceramic collection of Monsignor Joan Bonet. The current VINSEUM project does not accept this type of acquisition, both due to the type of heritage and the problems of storage saturation that new additions of this type would entail. However, the museum will be attentive to donation proposals that are legacies from relevant local artists, with the limitation of their volume as a condition for acquisition.

This collection also allows new acquisitions in line with addressing two major gaps: the contemporary art perspective on the world of wine and the gender perspective. The permanent exhibition of wine cultures in the future renovated museum will have a space dedicated to the perspective of contemporary Catalan art on the culture of the vine and wine. A changing space that will host works to be exhibited for periods of a maximum of 3 years. This is a very good opportunity to complete the art collection with contemporary works and increase the presence of women artists.

At the same time, VINSEUM is a museum that tells the story of the Penedès territory and its landscape. Everything that explains the Penedès region territory, acting as the capital when explaining and conceiving the historical Penedès, is of interest to the museum.

VINSEUM is part of the group of Catalan museums that are depositories of archaeological and paleontological material from the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of Catalonia. Currently, it stores materials from more than 650 sites in Vilafranca and the Penedès, continues to increase the volume with new additions of materials from Penedès sites, and manages collections that are temporarily loaned to third parties, such as those from the Turó de la Font de la Canya site.

New work selection criteria

The acceptance of an object must take into account the following criteria: suitability to the museum’s strategic lines and mission, suitability to the collections, conservation status of the object, conditions for accepting the acquisition, and logistical issues for the custody and preservation of the object at the museum.

Under no circumstances will the museum accept conditional donations. It is the museum itself that will decide the exhibition use and treatment that each object in its custody should receive.

Acquisition protocol

An acquisition will come from an acquisition proposal by an external legal entity or by the museum itself upon detecting an opportunity. Every proposal will be validated by a technical report that will assess the suitability or not of the acquisition proposal. Once the technical assessment report has been prepared, it will be the museum’s management that decides whether or not to incorporate the object into its collections. As a final phase, it will be the museum’s management that will report to the VINSEUM board of directors on all accepted acquisitions, and the board of directors will be the one to ratify them.

In the same way, members of the board of directors themselves can submit acquisition proposals that, once assessed and validated from a technical point of view, may be accepted at a regular meeting of this board of directors.

Every acceptance of an acquisition will involve its inventory and the opening of the corresponding record with basic data and all relevant and interesting information.

Ethics and transparency commitments

The museum’s acquisition policy is subject to the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics (1986) and current legislation on heritage asset transactions and intellectual property, and will pay special attention to issues such as materials from illegal excavations, conditional acquisitions, cooperation between museums, conflicts of interest, and professional conduct.

With the intention of complying with maximum transparency on the part of the institution, this acquisition policy document will be public and will be posted on the corporate website. In the same way, the institution will make public all new acquisitions.

The museum has a stable team of twenty-four professionals. This team is reinforced each year through temporary contracts conditioned to specific operations.