Collection

From its outset, the museum has been a benchmark for local archaeology, dating back to the time when Pere Giró, a scholar and archaeologist by vocation, was a pioneer in the excavation of sites in the Penedès region during the first half of the twentieth century.

Today, the museum houses the material from more than 600 excavated sites; an essential testimony for understanding human activity in the regions of Alt and Baix Penedès and Garraf, from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, including the Iberian and Romanization periods. Added to this collection are pieces of great historical and aesthetic interest, such as amphorae, oenochoae, askoi or aryballoi, which entered the museum with the intention of illustrating the “Archaeological Wine Exhibition”, an exhibition that would become the genesis of the Wine Museum, and which was inaugurated in 1943, on the occasion of the “First Vine and Wine Fair”, held that year in Vilafranca.

The art collection owes its origin to the donations of illustrious figures from Vilafranca in the twentieth century. In 1972, Manuel Trens donated his collection of liturgical art to the museum, made up of paintings, sculptures and gold and silver work of Catalan and Castilian origin, dating from the 12th to the 19th century, as well as an important collection of Catalan drawings and paintings from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Featuring the outstanding presence of works by diverse academics: Claudi Lorenzale, Lluís Rigalt, Simó Gómez and Pau Milà; landscape painters: Dionís Baixeras, Josep Berga; modernists: Josep Masriera, Joan Llimona, Joan Brull, Joaquim Mir, Josep Mirabent, Lluïsa Vidal and Alexandre de Riquer; and noucentistes: Josep Obiols, Enric Casanovas, Francesc Domingo, Darius Vilàs, Antoni Vila Arrufat, etc.

It is also important to highlight the pictorial collections from the legacies of prominent wine-producing families, such as the Pladellorens collection and the Berger collection, with the presence of artists including Masriera, Eliseu Meifrèn, Josep Maria Tamburini, Xavier Gosé, Ricard Urgell, Roig i Soler, Alexandre de Cabanyes and Armand Cardona Torrandell.

On the other hand, Joan Bonet i Baltà donated his pottery collection in 1978. The 1500 plus pieces are a unique testimony to the history of pottery production in Catalonia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth century. There are also pieces from other important centers in Spain, including Triana, Muel, Toledo and Talavera de la Reina.

In the ethnographic field, the museum is notable for having one of the institution’s most emblematic collections, the wine collection, a collection that owes its origin to the founding of the first Wine Museum in Spain in 1943, and which bears witness to centuries of activity in growing vines and producing wine in Catalan wineries. Along with a wide and interesting repertoire of field and winery utensils, there are also collections of ceramic and glass vessels that illustrate the uses and customs that humankind has gone on to impose in relation to the consumption of wine.

For more than fifty years, this collection has been accompanied by one of the elements that have become a sign of the old museum’s identity, the wine dioramas, which narrate, in a unique and aesthetic way, the history of the vineyard and wine through about twenty scenes with figures designed by local artists Pau Boada and Lluís M. Güell, made in the Castells brothers’ workshop in Barcelona.

The numismatic collection of the VINSEUM is extensive and diverse, ranging from medals commemorating local and international events, to coins from the Greek colony of Empúries, coins from the Roman period, Jaume I crusaders, choral coins from the Santa María parish in Vilafranca, forgeries of coins of Charles III and coins and paper money from the period of the Second Spanish Republic. The collection also includes a good number of contemporary coins from different European and American countries.

The Ornithology section at the VINSEUM was created in 1959, following the Vilafranca City Council’s acquisition a year earlier of the collection that Pere Mestre Raventós, an agricultural expert by training and ornithologist by vocation, began to create in 1957. During the years in which Mestre was in charge of the section and, together with his collaborators, he compiled, studied and classified a vast natural heritage that the museum still conserves and makes available for consultation and study by all specialists who request it. Thanks to the encyclopedic and exhaustive spirit that made the classification of this collection possible, the museum can now accurately trace the natural history of our geographical environment. The ornithological collection draws an exhaustive map of the avifauna present in the Penedès region and includes 300 birds of more than a hundred different species, with nearly 800 egg clutches and 96 nests.

The museum houses a unique collection in terms of understanding the geological and paleontological past of the Penedès region, with fauna specimens dating from the Paleozoic to the Miocene periods. However, most of the collection focuses on the Miocene period, when most of the subsoil of marine origin in the Penedès region was formed. A set of both vertebrate and invertebrate fossils with various paratypes and holotypes including the Metaxytherium Catalaunicum holotype.

A benchmark collection in Catalonia thanks to the work done by Lluís Via and Rossend Olivella and the rest of the collaborators who were part of this section for many years.

The collection is also made up of more than half a thousand mineral specimens, mainly from the Penedès region and Catalonia, but also from the rest of Spain and the rest of the world.

The museum has three collections with the same theme, wine labels, which make it unique in the wine museum field. The personal collection of Àngel Escudé, with more than 100,000 copies of labels from all over the world; the company collection of Gráficas Varias (a century-old company from Sant Sadurní d’Anoia specialized in printing champagne and cava labels); and the archive of the Xavier Bas Disseny graphic design studio, with an exhaustive compilation of its production specializing in wine labels from the 1990s until well into the second decade of the 21st century.