Antique 1930s Muscat De Valence Wine Label 🍷 Dutch Liquor Advertising Ephemera

What Was Muscat de Valence? 🍇 Muscat de Valence, Vin de Liqueur, R.C. Courtrai

Size: 5" x 3 1/2" ~ Unused.

What a beautiful view! This is an antique 1930s Muscat de Valence wine label, never used. You're looking out from a sunny terrace, past a stone balustrade with a jug and a pot of flowers, over a bay to the mountains, with a tower and a big leafy palm off to the right. Bunches of grapes and vine leaves hang down from the top corners like a stage curtain. Underneath, a parchment scroll reads MUSCAT DE VALENCE, VIN DE LIQUEUR.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• MUSCAT DE VALENCE
• VIN DE LIQUEUR
• CONT. 68-70 cl.
• R. C. COURTRAI 13491

That last little line is the one I love, because it tells you where this label went to work. Courtrai is the French name for Kortrijk, a Flemish, Dutch-speaking city in West Flanders, Belgium, and R.C. is the Registre du Commerce, Belgium's trade register. So 13491 is the trade-register number of the Kortrijk firm whose wine went out under this label. That's the Dutch in this one: Flemish Belgium.

🍷 Muscat from Valencia

Valence is the French name for Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and "Muscat de Valence" is Moscatel de Valencia, the sweet muscat wine of that region. It's a vin de liqueur, made by adding grape spirit to freshly pressed muscat juice, so it keeps the grapes' sweetness and gets its kick from the spirit. That's why the label shows a Mediterranean bay and a sunny terrace, and why Belgians still buy it under this very same French name today, as an aperitif and a dessert wine. The Valencia wine region even has its own Moscatel sub-zone, just west of the city.

🏰 Kortrijk on the Leie

Kortrijk is an old city. It started out as Cortoriacum, a Gallo-Roman settlement at an important crossroads near the river Leie (the Lys, in French), and it sits about 26 miles southwest of Ghent and 16 miles from Lille, just over the French border. In 1302 the Flemish beat the knights of King Philip the Fair of France right outside the city at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, a victory Flanders still marks as its holiday every July 11. After that Kortrijk grew into a great center of linen production. It had a hard twentieth century: the city was heavily bombed in the summer of 1917 and liberated by the British the next year, and in 1944 around 300 Lancaster bombers dropped over 5,000 bombs on the city center.

🏡 Display

No more vintage labels are being made. When the limited supply for sale has run out, and the labels are hanging with collectors or in galleries, they are going to be very hard to track down.

Picture this vintage advertising up on your wall, bringing a bit of history and elegance to whichever room you hang it in! It's a lovely little piece for a wine bar or a kitchen, and a perfect gift for anybody with Flemish roots, a love for Spain, or a soft spot for a sweet dessert wine.