Collection

From the very beginning, the museum has been the reference point for local archaeology, ever since Pere Giró, a scholar and archaeologist by vocation, pioneered the excavation of sites in the Penedès during the first half of the 20th century. Today, the museum holds material from more than 600 excavated sites—an essential testimony to human activity in the Alt and Baix Penedès and Garraf regions, from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, including the Iberian and Romanization periods. This collection is complemented by pieces of great historical and aesthetic interest, such as amphorae, oinochoes, askois, and aryballoi, which entered the museum to illustrate the “Archaeological Exhibition of Wine”—an exhibition that became the seed of the Wine Museum, inaugurated in 1943 on the occasion of the “First Vineyard and Wine Fair” held that year in Vilafranca.

The artistic collection owes its origin to donations from prominent figures of 20th-century Vilafranca. In 1972, Manuel Trens donated his collection of liturgical art to the museum, which includes paintings, sculptures, and goldsmithing from Catalonia and Castile, dating from the 12th to the 19th centuries, 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. The collection features notable works by academic artists such as Claudi Lorenzale, Lluís Rigalt, Simó Gómez, and Pau Milà; landscape painters like Dionís Baixeras and Josep Berga; modernists such as Josep Masriera, Joan Llimona, Joan Brull, Joaquim Mir, Josep Mirabent, Lluïsa Vidal, and Alexandre de Riquer; and noucentists like Josep Obiols, Enric Casanovas, Francesc Domingo, Darius Vilàs, Antoni Vila Arrufat, and others. The collection also includes paintings from the legacies of major families in the wine sector, such as the Pladellorens and Berger collections, featuring artists like Masriera, Eliseu Meifrèn, Josep Maria Tamburini, Xavier Gosé, Ricard Urgell, Roig i Soler, Alexandre de Cabanyes, and Armand Cardona Torrandell. In 1978, Joan Bonet i Baltà donated his ceramics collection. The more than 1,500 pieces are a unique testimony to the history of ceramic production in the Catalan Countries from the 14th to the 19th centuries. The collection also includes pieces from other important centers in Spain, such as Triana, Muel, Toledo, and Talavera de la Reina.

In the field of ethnography, the museum excels with one of its most emblematic collections: the wine collection. This collection originated with the founding of the first Wine Museum in Spain in 1943 and bears witness to centuries of activity in vine cultivation and wine production in Catalan wineries. Alongside a wide and fascinating array of tools from the vineyard and the winery, the collection also features ceramic and glass containers that illustrate the customs and practices humans have developed around wine consumption. For more than fifty years, this collection has been accompanied by one of the elements that has become a hallmark of the former museum: the wine dioramas, which uniquely and aesthetically narrate the history of the vine and wine through about twenty scenes with figures designed by local artists Pau Boada and Lluís M. Güell and crafted at the Castells brothers’ workshop in Barcelona.

VINSEUM’s numismatic collection is broad and diverse, containing everything from commemorative medals of local and international events to coins from the Greek colony of Empúries, Roman-era coins, croats from the reign of Jaume I, “pellofes” from the parish of Santa Maria de Vilafranca, counterfeit coins from the time of Charles IV, and coins and banknotes from the period of the Second Spanish Republic. The collection also includes a significant number of contemporary coins from various countries in Europe and America.

The Ornithology section of VINSEUM was created in 1959 following the acquisition by the Vilafranca City Council, a year earlier, of the collection started in 1957 by Pere Mestre Raventós, an agricultural expert by training and ornithologist by vocation. During the years that Mestre was responsible for the section, together with his collaborators, he managed to gather, study, and classify a vast natural heritage that they have bequeathed to society and which the museum preserves and makes available for consultation and study by specialists upon request. Thanks to the encyclopedic and thorough approach that made the classification of these collections possible, the museum can now accurately trace the natural history of our geographical area. On one hand, the ornithological collection provides a comprehensive map of the birdlife present in the Penedès, and includes 300 birds of more than a hundred different species, nearly 800 clutches of eggs, and 96 nests.

The museum has three collections on the same theme—wine labels—which make it unique in the field of wine museums. The personal collection of Àngel Escudé contains more than 100,000 wine labels from around the world; the business archive of Gráficas Varias (a century-old company from Sant Sadurní d’Anoia specializing in printing champagne and cava labels); and the archive of the graphic design studio Xavier Bas Disseny, with an extensive selection of their work specializing in wine labels from the 1990s through well into the second decade of the 21st century.