{"product_id":"antique-double-uncut-genievre-pur-grain-liquor-alcohol-label-1920s","title":"Antique Genièvre Pur Grain Double Uncut Liquor Label Sheet 🌾 Grinning Sailor, Wheat \u0026 Sailboat Color Lithograph","description":"\u003ch2\u003e🌾 Who Is the Grinning Sailor on This Antique Genièvre Pur Grain Double Uncut Liquor Label Sheet?\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 8\" x 5\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dpwOTLfYUsc\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat a great image. This fellow brings a smile to any face, and he has been doing it for the better part of a century. He's squeezed his eyes shut with pure delight, he's grinning ear to ear under a tall brown cap, his orange neckerchief is knotted in a jaunty bow, and he's holding up a little stemmed glass of pale genièvre like he's about to tell you the best story in the café. Behind him a small sailboat rides a blue sea. Under him two ears of wheat cross with long green leaves. And below it all, in big Gothic blackletter, \u003cstrong\u003eGenièvre\u003c\/strong\u003e, with \u003cstrong\u003ePur Grain\u003c\/strong\u003e in red underneath.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the whole sheet as it came off the press: \u003cstrong\u003etwo identical labels side by side, never cut apart\u003c\/strong\u003e, with a light-blue margin running around both. Each label has a blank white panel at the foot where a distiller's or bottler's name was meant to go. Nobody ever filled them in, so the sailor is still waiting to find out who he works for.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe trade dates this design to the 1920s and '30s, which gives it full antique status. It's New Old Stock, unused. I have a small stack of these, all the same uncut design, and the one you get comes off that stack.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🥃 What \"Genièvre Pur Grain\" Means\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGenièvre\u003c\/em\u003e is the French name for the juniper spirit of French Flanders, Belgium and the Netherlands (the Dutch call it jenever, the people of Liège call it peket). It's the old grandfather of gin. The first printed recipe for it is in a distilling book by Philippus Hermanni, a doctor in Antwerp, from the 1500s: crushed juniper berries mixed with wine and run through the still. The Dutch version was famous enough to be nicknamed \"Dutch courage,\" and English soldiers coming home from the wars in the Low Countries in the late 1500s and early 1600s brought the taste, and the word \"geneva,\" back with them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003cstrong\u003ePur Grain\u003c\/strong\u003e part was a promise, and it was a real one. Over in Belgium and the Netherlands, the big distilleries turned early to neutral alcohol made from sugar-beet molasses. The distillers of French Flanders and Artois stuck with grain, and France wrote it into law: from 1902, \"genièvre\" in France had to be a spirit distilled from fermented rye, wheat, barley or oats, with juniper berries in the still. So \"Pur Grain\" on a label like this one told the drinker: grain, not beet. Those wheat ears in the picture are making the same point without words.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe grains are still the same today. The French spirit is protected as \u003cstrong\u003eGenièvre Flandre Artois\u003c\/strong\u003e, a geographical indication written into European law in 1989: rye, barley, wheat and oats, at least one of them malted, with the last distillation done in copper pot stills with juniper berries in them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⚓ The Sailor, the Sea and the Glass\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe man on this label is pure good humour, and I think that was the whole idea. Genièvre was the drink of working people up there: factory hands, miners, and the \u003cem\u003emarins-pêcheurs\u003c\/em\u003e, the fishermen-sailors of the coast. Put a happy man of the sea on the bottle, with a boat behind him and the grain under him, and anyone in a northern café would know exactly what was in it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCollectors like to say the sailor was also a nod to the export trade, and there's real history under that one. Right after the French Revolution, about two-thirds of the genièvre made in the north was shipped out, mostly to England and to the colonies across the Atlantic. Some dealers call this fellow \"the Dutchman\" for that cap. There's a genièvre pur grain label out there with a coal miner and his pick in the frame instead; this one went with the sea.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLean in close and you'll see his face is built up from a fine crosshatch of tiny dots, with the black lines of the drawing laid over the top. The big G in Genièvre is so fancy it reads like an O at first glance. That's blackletter for you.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏷️ Why the Bottom Panel Is Blank\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a \u003cstrong\u003estock label\u003c\/strong\u003e. Printers in Paris and Lille sold ready-made designs out of catalogs, each with its own model number, and a small distillery, brewery or drinks merchant would order a run and have its own name and village printed into the panel at the foot. One house could put its name on a whole run of stock designs, one for each drink it sold. This sheet is the design before any of that happened. It never went back to the press for a name, and it never went near a bottle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🍺 The Dequiedt Thread, Saint-Quentin, Pas-de-Calais\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCollectors tie Genièvre Pur Grain labels to one name in particular: \u003cstrong\u003eDequiedt\u003c\/strong\u003e. It's a Nord family name, and the name books reckon it's a form of De Quick, Flemish for quick and lively, which suits a label this cheerful.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe history behind that name is real, and France's national heritage inventory records it. Around 1900 a Monsieur Dequiedt set up a brewery and malt-house \u003cem\u003einside his own farm\u003c\/em\u003e at Saint-Quentin, a hamlet of Aire-sur-la-Lys in the Pas-de-Calais. It was also known as the Saint-Quentin brewery. The farmhouse went up in 1775, the same year Louis XVI let a Dunkirk man named Stival start making genièvre (more on him below). The house was enlarged in 1854 and the brewery in 1907. Its machines ran off a petrol engine until electricity came in during the early-to-mid 1920s, the brewing vats and the malt kiln were fired with wood and coke, and the water came up a well bored 65 meters deep. Malting stopped around 1925. Up to 1940 the brewery kept five people at work. Brewing ended in 1957, and the place carried on as a drinks depot until 1986. The inventory's photo files include a letterhead from about 1910 with a picture of the brewery on it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBetter still for a label collector, labels for the Dequiedt house still turn up in France: rum, a wine from Oran, table wine, the house beer. The rum label reads \u003cstrong\u003e\"R. DEQUIEDT – Saint-Quentin-lez-Aires (P.-de-C.)\"\u003c\/strong\u003e across the foot, and the rum and wine labels show exactly how a stock label worked. A Lille printer supplied the design by model number (\"Mod. 118\" on the wine), and the Dequiedt name and village were printed in along the bottom, right where the panel sits empty on this sheet. Whether this particular sailor ever carried the Dequiedt name is still an open question.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⛵ Genièvre Country: Smugglers, a King's Permit and a Hundred Stills\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🚫 \u003cstrong\u003e1601:\u003c\/strong\u003e the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who ruled the Spanish Netherlands (French Flanders and Artois included), banned spirit distilled from grain. Back-room stills and smugglers bringing it in from Holland kept it flowing through the whole century anyway.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e👑 \u003cstrong\u003e1775:\u003c\/strong\u003e the story goes that Stival and a partner, Carpeau, got special permission from Louis XVI to make genièvre, officially as a remedy for the sicknesses of the northern marshes, and then slipped into Holland to learn how the Dutch built their stills. The catch in the royal permit: not a drop could be shipped by sea or by land to anywhere else in the kingdom. The wine-brandy makers wanted no competition.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e📖 \u003cstrong\u003e1782:\u003c\/strong\u003e a French writer on daily life reported that the spirit made at Dunkirk \"passes for one of the best there is.\"\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🔓 \u003cstrong\u003eAfter the Revolution:\u003c\/strong\u003e the barriers fell. By 1795 Saint-Omer had six distilleries, and by 1804 the Nord had seventy-two. Most of them were part of a farm: grain went in, spirit came out, the spent mash fed the cattle, and the stills ran through the winter. (Sound familiar? Monsieur Dequiedt's brewery sat in his farmyard the same way.)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e⛏️ \u003cstrong\u003eEarly 1900s:\u003c\/strong\u003e with the coal mines and textile mills booming, about a hundred distilleries were turning out some 30,000 hectolitres a year, and genièvre was the favorite drink of the miners and mill workers, who drank it \"to give themselves courage.\"\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e☕ \u003cstrong\u003eThe bistouille:\u003c\/strong\u003e the Nord's morning coffee with a splash of genièvre in it, taken at the café before work. It warmed you up and put some heart into a hard day.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏭 Who Still Makes It\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe hundred stills dwindled over the twentieth century. In 1999 the heritage service counted the Claeyssens distillery at \u003cstrong\u003eWambrechies\u003c\/strong\u003e (Nord) as one of the last three still working in the region. Today there are two: Wambrechies, a genièvre distillery since 1817 and now a listed historic monument, and \u003cstrong\u003eHoulle\u003c\/strong\u003e (Pas-de-Calais), founded in 1812 by the Decocq family on the edge of the Audomarois marshes and run by the Persyn family since 1942. The third old name, \u003cstrong\u003eLoos\u003c\/strong\u003e, is still bottled, but it's made at Wambrechies now. Houlle, Loos and Wambrechies are the three names the protected genièvre leans on to this day.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe spirit hung on. The paper is another story: labels get lost to floods, fires and damp basements every year, and the ones left are the ones somebody put in a drawer and forgot about.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎁 A Blank Panel Is a Gift Waiting to Happen\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHere's my favorite thing about stock labels: that empty panel is yours. Letter in a name, a wedding date, a \"Cheers to 40 years,\" or your own family's house name, and this sailor raises his glass to whoever you like. Two labels on one sheet means you can make a pair, or keep it whole and frame it as is.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🖼️ \u003cstrong\u003eFrame it whole:\u003c\/strong\u003e the two joined labels make a wide, cheerful piece that reads straight away as something from the printer's shop.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🍸 \u003cstrong\u003eHome bar or bar cart:\u003c\/strong\u003e next to a bottle of genever or a good gin, its grandson.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🗺️ \u003cstrong\u003eA northern France or Flemish heritage wall:\u003c\/strong\u003e with family photos, old maps or postcards from Lille, Dunkirk or Saint-Omer.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🌾 \u003cstrong\u003eKitchen or dining room:\u003c\/strong\u003e the wheat, the yellow and that grin warm up any wall.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ FAQ\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eQ: Is \"Genièvre Pur Grain\" a brand name?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nA: No, it's a description: juniper spirit made purely from grain. Distilleries and bottlers on both sides of the French-Belgian border used the phrase. The house name went in the blank panel at the foot, and on this sheet both panels are still empty.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eQ: How old is it?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nA: Dealers who handle this sailor put him in the 1920s or '30s, so he's an antique. Never cut, never applied to a bottle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eQ: Are the two labels really still joined?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nA: Yes. It's one sheet, 8\" x 5\", with both labels side by side exactly as they were printed. You can keep it whole or cut it into a matching pair.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eQ: Is genièvre still made?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nA: It is. Wambrechies in the Nord and Houlle in the Pas-de-Calais still distil it from grain with juniper berries, and a bottle of either makes a fine companion for this sheet on the bar.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-muscat-de-valence-dutch-liquor-alcohol-wine-label-1930s\"\u003eAntique 1930s Muscat De Valence Wine Label 🍷 Dutch Liquor Advertising Ephemera\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-sutter-buttes-crate-label-yuba-city-ca-1950s-treasures-gifts\"\u003eVintage 1950s Sutter-Buttes Crate Label 🏔️ California Fruit Exchange Yuba City Blue Anchor Lithograph\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/very-rare-antique-1910s-massage-cream-gold-embossed-label-paris-montreal\"\u003eAntique 1910s Massage Cream Label 💆 from Paris Montreal Chicago\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43698649465064,"sku":"VAG-7934343151848","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.4145096815_96m5.jpg?v=1785358296","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-double-uncut-genievre-pur-grain-liquor-alcohol-label-1920s","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}