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Inside Bordeaux’s ‘Guggenheim of wine’

26 May 2016 By Lauren Eads

With just days to go before its grand opening, we take a peek inside the futuristic €81m (£58m) Cité du Vin wine centre in Bordeaux, which has been dubbed the ‘Guggenheim of wine’.

Due to open on 1 June after three years of construction, the multi-million-pound museum will be dedicated to the culture and civilisation of wine around the world and aims to provide an “immersive, interactive, multi-sensory experience” for around 450,000 visitors per year.

The museum is located on the banks of the Garonne river in St-Emilion and measures 55m in height. Its 23 rooms will offer visitors the opportunity to take “a tour of the vineyards of the world”, with the history of winemaking civilisations revealed through exhibits of 85 winemaking countries.

The building was designed by architects Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazières from the French architecture firm XTU in conjunction with British interior design agency Casson Mann. Due to its avant-garde, fluid exterior, the building has already attracted the moniker of the ‘Guggenheim of wine’, with the curved structure intended to mimic the swirl of wine in a decanter of glass.

The Cité du Vin will also feature a wine bar, a wine shop and a panoramic restaurant, Le 7 Restaurant, on the seventh floor, as well as a 600m² wine cellar housing around 10,000 bottles of wine.

The complex also boasts a a 90-metre pontoon secured to the banks of the Garonne allowing pleasure boats to tie up closer to La Cité du Vin, while water shuttles will enable visitors to travel to vineyards from the museum along the river.

Entry to the attraction will cost €20 for adults, €10 for a young person and €8 for children, with children under six free.

In numbers:-

A 13,350 m² space split over 10 levels
A tower 55 metres high
3,000 m² containing 19 thematic modules
A tour available in eight languages
Nearly 100 experts and specialists interviewed to create content
250-seater auditorium for performances and concerts, screenings, conferences and debates.
Three tasting areas including an immersive multi-sensory space, and educational workshops for young audiences.

Click through for a sneak peek inside the world’s most futuristic wine museum…

One response to “Inside Bordeaux’s ‘Guggenheim of wine’”

Martin Moran says:

May 26, 2016 at 9:23 pm

This isn’t a sneek preview but already available digitally created projected images of what it would look like!

Reply