Gift Wrapping

This witty little volume, first published in French in 1936, extols the many joys and benefits of wine. Wine drinkers will take pleasure in Gaston Derys’s quaint appreciation of the grape, and art lovers will admire Raoul Dufy’s joyful watercolors. Reflecting the exuberance and élan of an earlier day, Derys takes us back to a time when the doctor’s favored prescription was an amiable glass of wine.

Mon Docteur Le Vin, was the brainchild of Étienne Nicolas, the innovative director of the chain of wine shops that carries his family name to this day. In essence an advertisement, the book was designed to promote a specific image of French wine, and hence to help sell wines made in that image. Nicolas wanted to present wine as something healthy and natural, and at the same time cultured and refined—which is exactly what the combination of Gaston Derys’ prose and Raoul Dufy’s art does. Derys, quoting from scientific authorities, offers ostensibly factual evidence of wine’s nourishing properties, while Dufy provides glimpses of elegant haute-bourgeoisie leisure. His paintings do not depict people drinking wine. In fact, only two contain images of wine at all. Instead, the illustrations are of wine’s effects: civilized health and happiness hand in hand. This would be but a pretty piece of propaganda were it not for the fact that the book plays a small part in a much larger story, that of the changing face of wine in French and indeed all of Western culture. More than most of his colleagues in the wine trade at the time, Étienne Nicolas foresaw that the new guarantees of authenticity being legislated in France would lead to new standards of wine quality and, equally important, new habits of appreciation. And he wanted his stores to profit from the change. Mon Docteur Le Vin did not advertise the Nicolas shops or even the wines sold there. Instead, it simply promoted wine.