Better than the Internet !
Winery tools in 1958, 1955 and 1934
Although the company still exists today, the younger generation may ignore the name of Manufrance. This company was the first mail-order company in this country when it began working in 1885, its original name was Manufacture Française d'Armes et Cycles de St.Etienne as its prime products were guns
and cycles and it was based in the industrial town of Saint Etienne. I discovered that the company
was still around even though we don't hear much about it these days, it reached its peak certainly in the 1970s' before large supermarkets became ubiquitous even in the countryside. Manufrance sold primarily guns with their ammo (which remain their prime products from what I understand), bicycles, motorbikes (the latter disappeared in the 1950s', with the ill-fated government post-WW2 policies against small/medium businesses), but it had also been selling all along the 20th century all kind of tools including professional ones. Just leafing through a catalog a few decades old makes you imagine the wonder of the potential buyer with all these informative images about their products, at a time there was no Internet. You could become a beehiver, make cheese, buy all sort of music instruments, buy all sort of traps to poach or any imaginable agriculture tools including walk plows, everything, including you guess it, here I come, all you need to make wine...
I stumbled upon two such catalogs in Strasbourg some time ago (a friends kept them as collectibles), one was from 1934 and the other from 1955 and I found other views online of the 1958 issue. I focused of course on the winemaking and cellar tools, this was very exciting when you think to all the myriads of small backyard and family parcels that have certainly been uprooted since. One odd thing is there isn't that much differences (apart from the inflation in the prices) between the winery/viticulture tools when you compare the 1930s' and the 1950s', that's strange.
The pages reproduced here come from 3 Manufrance mail-order catalogs, 1934, 1955 and 1958 (screen shots). You can leaf through the 1958 catalog at the bottom of this page, the range of products is pretty weird and much of this stuff is professionnal, you could start a business with them, including start your domaine...
Speaking of the price conversion, according to this page a French Franc from 1958 was worth the equivalent of 0,01649 €.
Some of this stuff seems odd for those years (1934) : anti-hail rockets. They have models exploding at different altitudes : 700 meters, 800 meters and 1200 meters (Arianespace in its infancy...).
Also : bags to protect the grape clusters, like they do today in Japan, they're made of paper, coated canvas or thin metal canvas, the latter are said to offer a protection against wasps and are reusable year after year (waste of money, I think).
Sorry for the poor quality of these pics (1934 catalog), I had then with me as a pocket camera a Canon G12 when I visited this friend in Strasbourg (this was in 2013) and was showed the catalogs (there was no scanner in the house), the Canon is pretty bad in certain light conditions and I fortunately switched later for the much better Fuji X30.
On this page there's an interesting tool combining both a crusher and a press : you can crush the grapes or the fruits and press them at the same time. While you press a load of crushed fruit another basket fills with more crushed fruit so that you can virtually press in continuum.
At the top of this page you can see the sulfur wicks and other winelmaking additives
Detail : There's a special sulfur candle (lower left) to disinfectate rooms (cellars or chais) at the dose of 25 grams per square meter. On the upper right there's an "antifermentation and preservative" additive, it's a "legal product" it says, which hints that there were quite a few "illegal" additives going around at that time. A pack of 25 grams can give "a perfect preservation" to a 225-liter batch and prevent it to "spoil or get oily without harming its taste and aromas".
Below, there's a fining agent for reds and whites (Albuminoïde gélatineux), guaranteed without smell.
Below is another fining agent made of caseine pure, makes wines crystal clear....
They really could do their bottlings easy back then, look at this automatic filler that can do up to 300 bottles per hour, you don't need to turn the tap on the barrel, it's all on the bottle side, no pumps, no violence on the wine...
Here it's interesting to see that bottles were re-usable as well as corks, probably, here they sell conical corks as well as cylindric ones. Note on the lower left the wire for sparkling wines, and on the lower right the swinging closure (beer type) that can be fit without using tools.
Here are a few leafable extracts of the catalog 1958 (including some of the pages I posted) : Page 243 to 277 (fishing gear), here page 277 to 356 (cameras, photo lab, office stuff), here357 to 484 (bed sheets, furniture, home appliances), here page 533 to 597 (farming tools including winery tools).
Interesting page about a strange rifle made by Manufrance (can shoot 3 bullets at the same time)
Innovative hand gun designed by Manufrance, the Pistolet Gaulois (1893), dubbed the pocket machine gun.
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