Musée du Vin et du Négoce

The house

Grégory Pecastaing was a young Bordeaux wine merchant when he set up the association Bordeaux Historia Vini, in November 2007, to keep the memory of the Chartrons and to build a museum of wine and its trade there. Bordeaux had joined the UNESCO World Heritage list that year, and as he put it, “All the wine museums in Bordeaux have closed in recent years.” The quarter runs along the river north of the old city, and it is where the négociants (merchants who buy from the châteaux and sell on) of Bordeaux kept their cellars. By February 2008 the négociants Schröder & Schÿler and Cordier were preparing to give it documents and objects. That year the museum opened, in an 18th-century merchant’s house that had been the house of a royal broker under Louis XV.

The visit goes down into the vaulted, half-underground cellars where the barrels once lay. There the permanent collection sits: documents, rare bottles, films and the tools of the cellar. It runs from Antiquity to the 20th century, through the city, its port and its wines, the merchant families who settled in the Chartrons, barrel aging, bottles and labels.

Bordeaux Historia Vini runs it to this day, with Grégory Pecastaing as its founding president. In 2013 a study of how the names of wine are protected in Bordeaux and in the United Kingdom took the museum as a measure of how long the trade has mattered to the city. Open every day of the week, it holds workshops on tasting and on blending alongside the visit, and evenings with winegrowers. Its shop is in the house’s old cooperage, and every visit ends with a tasting.

At a glance

Kind

Institution

Based in

Bordeaux, in the Chartrons

Founded

November 2007, the association; the museum opened in 2008

Owner

The association Bordeaux Historia Vini, since 2007

Direction

Grégory Pecastaing, founding president