Antique 1920s - 1930s Aux Vignes de France Alcohol Label 🍇 "In The Vineyards of France"

Aux Vignes de France Label 🍇 House Mark of a Menin, Belgium Wine & Spirits Merchant

Size: 4 1/2" x 1"

"Aux Vignes de France" - "In the Vineyards of France" - across a strip of the French tricolor, blue, white and red, with a little crowned shield of three black chevrons in the middle and a gold frame all the way around. Never used. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🔎 Who It Belonged To

It reads like a French slogan, but it was a business. Aux Vignes de France was a wine and spirits house in Menin - Menen, in Flemish - in Belgium, right on the French border, and that crowned three-chevron shield was its mark. It's Menin's own coat of arms, too. The town was granted three black chevrons on silver under a gold crown in 1824, confirmed in 1838, and that is exactly the shield sitting in the middle of this strip. The chevrons stayed black until 1953, when Menin changed them back to the red its lords had carried in the 1200s. So the house put its hometown's arms right in the middle of the French flag. The same shield turns up on the house's other labels: a Bobby Rhum Vieux label printed "Aux Vignes de France, Menin," and an Amer du Nord bitters label carrying the shield and the house's number in the commercial register at Courtrai, R.C. 11303. So this little tricolor strip was the house's own band, and it went out on whatever Aux Vignes de France was bottling that season - rum, bitters, brandy or wine. A Belgian merchant wrapping his bottles in the French flag and calling his business "In the Vineyards of France" was a pitch that made perfect sense a stone's throw from the border.

🥃 Selling Spirits in Belgium

A Belgian spirits house had an odd time of it. The Vandervelde law, in force from August 29, 1919, took spirits out of Belgium's cafes and bars entirely - you could still buy them to drink at home, but only two liters at a time or more - and it stayed on the books until January 1, 1984. So houses like this one sold to kitchens and cellars rather than across the bar, and a bottle had to look good on the shelf at home.

🏙️ Menin on the Lys

Menin sits on the Lys River facing the French town of Halluin, about 11 kilometers from Kortrijk - Courtrai - where the house was registered. Menin was French from 1668 to 1713, and Louis XIV had Vauban fortify it between 1679 and 1689, and the road out of Ypres toward it is why the Menin Gate there carries the name.

📜 The Stories

Old-timers in the paper ephemera trade tell of merchant houses that kept their stock rooms stacked with labels printed by the thousand, to go on whatever the house had in the cellar that month. And collectors of Prohibition-era paper like to say French-flag labels like this one sometimes dressed bottles slipped into the United States during the dry years, 1920 to 1933, because a tricolor made a smuggled bottle look respectable.

Charming framed small, by a wine rack or a home bar.