Antique 1930s Oude Schiedam Dutch Liquor Label 🥃 Rare, Spiritueux, R.C. Courtrai

What Was Oude Schiedam? 🥃 Oude Schiedam Spiritueux, "Gestookt volgens d'Oude Wyze"

Size: 5 3/4" x 3 1/2"

Look at that face! A jolly, bald, rosy-cheeked fellow in a red coat, raising a little glass of genever at you. This is an antique 1930s Oude Schiedam spirits label, never put on a bottle, with the royal castle seal on the bottom. This label is absolutely stunning.

🔍 What's on it

OUDE SCHIEDAM in big old-style lettering on a torn parchment scroll at the top. Below, our friend behind a wooden rail between two turned columns, with white ribbons curling around him and a stemmed glass in his hand. At the lower right hangs a big red wax seal with a little gabled house or castle pressed into it, on a white ribbon. The parchment panel at the bottom reads SPIRITUEUX and, in Dutch, Gestookt volgens d'Oude Wyze, "distilled the old way." Across the heading and the panel, OUDE SCHIEDAM is overprinted in red script. The foot line reads Dép., 6743, R. C. Courtrai 11303 and M.v.d.H. The back is plain, with the design showing faintly through.

When we first got these over a decade ago, this one and the version without the seal were fairly common labels. That has obviously changed dramatically, since they were extremely popular for their amazing image. I'm excited to see what else I have in this box!

🇧🇪 Printed for Belgium

That little foot line tells you where this label came from. R.C. stands for the Registre du Commerce, the Belgian trade register, and Courtrai is the French name for Kortrijk, Belgium, in West Flanders. Dép. is short for déposé, registered. So this is a Belgian label, and it's bilingual the way Belgium is: SPIRITUEUX in French, and "Gestookt volgens d'Oude Wyze" in Dutch, with the old spelling wyze for wijze. Whose initials M.v.d.H are is still an open question — a good thread for a Kortrijk historian to pull.

🌾 Why "Oude Schiedam"?

Schiedam, just west of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, is the old capital of genever, the Dutch and Flemish grain spirit that gin grew out of. The world's first known commercial distillery started there in 1575, and in the 1700s and 1800s dozens of distilleries there shipped Schiedam genever all over the world. The gin trade and the coal smoke from all those stills gave the town its old nickname, "Black Nazareth" (Zwart Nazareth). The distillers needed so much grain ground that Schiedam built the tallest traditional windmills in the world, tall enough to catch the wind over the warehouses, and five of them, De Noord, Walvisch, Drie Koornbloemen, Nieuwe Palmboom and Vrijheid, are still standing.

The name carried so much weight that "Oude Schiedam," old Schiedam, became a style that distillers put on their bottles well beyond the town itself, and this Belgian label is a good example. "Oude" means the old style of genever, the maltier kind, made "the old way," just like the label says.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That jolly face is perfect framed in a bar, a den or a kitchen, and it's a great gift for anybody with Dutch or Flemish roots, or anybody who likes a good genever.

Old labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums have galleries of them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. They aren't making any more vintage labels, obviously, so once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.