A wine museum, Cité Du Vin, (City of Wine) nicknamed the Guggenheim of Wine by the Mayor has opened in Bordeaux in France. The word Guggenheim is after the New York art museum, famous for its spiral design (very novel in the days when most galleries and buildings would have been oblong).
However, the pictures of the interior reminded me of the central atrium in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. (Rather nearer to France than the USA.)
The museum is certainly avant grade. The outside is clad in aluminium. Inside are what look like column sized wooden wine bottles.
The price of 20 Euros, about 22 American dollars, about £10, includes a glass of wine - and a chance to admire a panoramic view over the riverside city through the slanting floor to ceiling windows from the rooftop wine bar (a bit like the exciting views from the Shard in London or looking along the river Thames from the Oxo restaurant).
You pay an extra $15 for an atelier (workshop). From next year, 2017, they will be opening the first of their exhibitions. Each year the exhibition will feature a different country. The exhibition entry will cost you an extra $8.
Videos show you historic characters such as Churchill, and Napoleon and French writer Colette (who wrote Gigi).
Bordeaux is a contraction of the words border and water which is how you remember it is on the waterside or seaside on the west coast of France. The new museum is also called the shrine to wine.
The outside of the museum resembles wine swirling in a glass. Inside it is modern but tall as a cathedral, very impressive.
Photo from Wikipedia.
Drive south into Spain and you can visit a Spanish wine museum.
Spanish Wine Museum
I visited an excellent wine museum in a village outside Haro, in the Rioja region of northern Spain. it has huge numbers of different vines planted outside alongside the car park with a path and plaques and notice boards, each vine labelled.
Inside was a large exhibition on wine, a supermarket size shop selling everything from bottle openers and wine glasses and books and postcards to scarves and clothes with wine bottle of grape motifs. An all day gourmet cafe and an expensive fine restaurant for lunch or dinner were also on the site, and a paid for cellar tour.
The USA Today website has a series of slides you can click on and read the text about the Cité du Vin museum. The city of wine is, of course, Bordeaux.
Wine Museums Worldwide
The Forbes website covers the Bordeaux museum but allows you to click on links to the wine museums in California, France and Greece.
Wikipedia lists other wine museums worldwide which include those in Cyprus.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36424039
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/experience/food-and-wine/2016/05/31/cite-du-vin-bordeaux/85153062/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wine_museums Cité Du Vin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wine_museums list of wine museums
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eustaciahuen/2016/05/31/worlds-first-wine-theme-park-museum-opens-in-bordeaux/#2125202453c0
https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2015/07/top-10-wine-museums-of-the-world/
Wine Museums:
FRANCE
Hameau Dubref
GERMANY
Mosel Vinothek and Wine museum
See reviews on TripAdvisor.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g198633-d1873535-Reviews-Mosel_Vinothek_Wine_Museum-Bernkastel_Kues_Rhineland_Palatinate.html
MALTA
I took a tour of the Marvsovin premises with a tasting. See photo in next post.
Near Haro, Rioja region
Vinopolis, London;
Berry Brothers wine shop in a historic building in London near Piccadilly. Berry Brothers hold wine tastings in their cellars in the evenings, must book, quite expensive.
Drive out to Denbies, on a summer day and you can book and pay for an indoor or outdoor wine tour. They have a ground floor cafeteria and a large shop, plus a grander upstairs restaurant.
California Wine Museum
Americans have contributed to the funds need to develop the wine museum in France.
I shall give the last word to the French.
Napoleon said of Champagne, "In victory you deserve it; in defeat you need it!"
Angela Lansbury, author of Quick Quotations, travel writer, researcher and photographer. Author and speaker.
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