VINSEUM’s Mission:

To place Catalonia’s wine culture at the service of society, and to project it as a catalyst for sustainable and democratic territorial development, within the framework of an institution that is open to the public, accessible, inclusive and diverse, dedicated to recovering, preserving, researching, interpreting and disseminating Catalonia’s wine heritage, offering a wide range of experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and the exchange of knowledge.

Objectives

1. To implement all the activities that are inherent to a museum, that is, the research and collection of all sorts of cultural assets, both movable and immovable, tangible and intangible, especially those related to Vilafranca del Penedès, to the Penedès region and to Catalan wine cultures; to promote their study, conservation, documentation and exhibition, as well as the dissemination of their knowledge for research, education and intellectual and aesthetic appreciation.
2. To manage the facilities assigned to the foundation that are intended to achieve the tasks that are typical of a museum.
3. To organize and host cultural activities related to the history and culture and local heritage and wine cultures of Catalonia, as well as to open up the facilities to debate and reflection on key issues for the knowledge of contemporary society. And to do so in the spirit of collaboration, integration and co-creation to strengthen the institution’s ties with the social, educational and cultural associative fabric of Vilafranca, the Penedès region and Catalonia.
4. To contribute to the promotion of the territory. The museum aims to be understood as a tourist resource that, due to its subject matter, uniqueness and dimension, becomes strategic in the forums of the major tourism promotion agents of Vilafranca, the Penedès region and Catalonia.

History, in brief

The Precedents

El Niu d’Art (1915-1927), pioneers in the promotion of local culture and heritage; the 1st Penedès Art Exhibition, the county’s heritage is exhibited for the first time (1926); Martí Grivé directs the county’s first archaeological excavations (1930-1935).

The Foundation

In August 1935, the Museum of Vilafranca was born with a board of trustees presided over by the city’s mayor, Josep Masachs Llorach, and by the councilor for culture, musician Francesc de Paula Bové. They are accompanied by a large group of intellectuals and prominent people from Vilafranca.

The First Wine Museum

The museum hosts The Archaeology of Wine, the exhibition of the First Vine and Wine Fair (1943), which ends up being the genesis of the first wine museum founded in Spain (1947).

The Royal Palace of Vilafranca is Reborn

The museum’s new historical headquarters begins the process of architectural recovery of its medieval forms. 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); Mosén Manuel Trens, Catalan art from the first half of the 20th century and liturgical art (1972); and Mosén Antoni Bonet i Baltà, ceramics (1978).

The museum incorporates the building attached to the Palace and transforms it into its new exhibition space for the newly arrived collections (1973).

The Democratic Transition, More Cultural Spaces for the Museum

The San Pelegrín Chapel is incorporated into the museum and rehabilitated as a space for temporary exhibitions (1980). Josefa Tomàs’ donation of Casa Amiguet (1982) enables 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 Protectorate of Foundations and Verification of the Activity of Associations declared of Public Utility, published in this section is the information to enforce the principle of transparency and the obligations in terms of active publicity derived from the law.

Statutes

Governing bodies

Team

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

The Museum of Vilafranca 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 paramount throughout the different stages in which this institution has been growing thanks to the initiative and voluntarism of its citizens. These people have been providing the city with a unique space that, through the conservation of the heritage that has been deposited there, reflects and disseminates our culture, while at the same time becoming a center of reference.

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

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

In 2010, with the disappearance of Caixa Penedès, the city council took on the role of main supporter of the museum project, and since then the foundation has been mainly owned and financed by the local public administration.

Governing bodies

The foundation currently consists of a board of trustees that governs and represents the institution and a board of directors that is responsible for its running, together with the management, which develops the established project thanks to a technical team of museologists, an administrative team and another team of people who are in charge of user service and maintenance.

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

The museum works with different networks and entities with which it exchanges points of view, resources and knowledge, both related to the environment and to its field of work.

Priorities and Areas of Interest

The VINSEUM is a museum specializing in the wine cultures of the entire Catalan territory; this is the priority of its growth and specialization in contrast to the rest of the country’s museums.

In broad terms, the museum has a very diverse heritage in its origin and its relationship with the territory, encompassing various fields of knowledge, not only related to vineyards and wine. In its role as the main entity managing the heritage of the Penedès region, its growth expectations are focused on completing its ethnological wine collections, but also with a desire to acquire collections that help to expand our knowledge of the history of Vilafranca, mainly, and of the Penedès region in general.

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

As an example, and in the field of vineyards and wine, the museum focuses on the different trades of the barrel maker, the glassmaker, the cork maker or the mule driver, which have accompanied the wine tradition for centuries. One of the ways in which the museum’s collections are growing is precisely in underrepresented areas, such as the glassmaker, the barrel maker, the cork maker or the mule driver.

On the other hand, in the field of ethnology, the museum has no record of intangible Catalan wine heritage, nor any record on local themes. Therefore, one of the possible ways of increasing the museum’s collections is the new addition of a collection of oral memory archives. 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 hasn’t been systematized. We should point out that the VDC continues to receive donations, always contingent upon our two main thematic areas, the world of wine and the Penedès territory. In this case, acquisitions avoid duplication and are always conditioned to complete open collections such as the local newspaper library, the Festa Major collection, the Musical Archive or the bibliographic and documentary wine collection.

The art collection is one of the museum’s most outstanding collections, after the wine ethnology and archaeology collections. In spite of all this, it is a collection mainly consisting of large donations, such as the bequest of Father Manuel Trens, the Pladellorens family, or the ceramic collection of Father Joan Bonet. The current VINSEUM project does not accept this type of acquisitions, both because of the type of heritage and because of the problems of overcrowding of the reserves that any new entries of this type would entail. Even so, the museum will be attentive to donation proposals that are legacies of relevant local artists, with the limitation of their volume as a prerequisite for the acquisition.

This collection also allows for new acquisitions along the lines of filling two major gaps, the contemporary art vision of the world of wine and the gender perspective. The permanent exhibition of wine cultures of the future renovated museum will have a space dedicated to the vision of contemporary Catalan art regarding vine and wine culture. A changing space that will house works that will be exhibited over 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 female artists.

At the same time, the VINSEUM is a museum that explains the Penedès territory and its landscape. The museum is interested in everything that explains the territory of the Penedès region, exercising a capital status when it comes to explaining and conceiving the historical Penedès.

The VINSEUM is part of the group of Catalan museums that are depositary museums for archaeological and paleontological material of the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Directorate General of Cultural Heritage. It currently houses materials from more than 650 sites in Vilafranca and the Penedès region, continues to increase its volume with new additions of materials from sites around the Penedès region, and manages collections that are on temporary loan to third parties, such as those from the Turó de la Font de la Canya site.

Criteria for the Selection of New Works

In order to accept an object, the following criteria must be taken into account: compliance with the museum’s strategic lines and mission, suitability for the collections, state of conservation of the object, acceptance conditions for its admission, 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 of each object in its custody.

Acquisition Protocol

An acquisition will be made through an acquisition proposal by an external legal entity or by the museum itself when it detects an opportunity. All proposals will be validated by a technical report that will assess the suitability or non-suitability of the acquisition proposal. Once the technical evaluation report has been drafted, the museum’s management will decide whether or not to include the object in the museum’s collection. During the final phase, the museum management will inform the VINSEUM Board of Directors of all accepted acquisitions and the Board of Directors will confirm them.

Likewise, the members of the board of directors may submit acquisition proposals which, once assessed and validated from a technical point of view, may be accepted at an ordinary meeting of this board of directors.

Every acceptance of an acquisition will involve its inventory and the opening of the corresponding file with the basic data and all the relative information of interest.

Ethics and Transparency Commitments

The museum’s acquisition policy is subject to the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics (1986) and current legislation regarding heritage and intellectual property transactions, and will devote special attention to issues such as materials from illegal excavations, conditional acquisitions, inter-museum cooperation and conflicts of interest, as well as the conduct of professionals.

In the spirit of ensuring maximum transparency on behalf of the institution, this acquisition policy document will be made public and posted on the corporate website. Likewise, the institution will publicize 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.