Behind closed doors: La Cité du Vin

Creating and setting up a temporary exhibition at the Cité du Vin involves several years of work, and changing a programme which has been set up for months is not easy. Following the postponement of the ‘Drink with the gods’ exhibition to 2021, Marion Eybert, temporary exhibition manager at the Cité du Vin, explains to us the reasons for this decision, how the teams are adapting to working from home and her hopes for what’s to come.

Hi there Marion! Our first question has to be, why couldn’t the ‘Drink with the gods’ exhibition go ahead this year?

Well, the exhibition was originally meant to open to the public on 10 April – in fact, when the lockdown was announced in France on 16 March, the main part of the exhibition was already set up. We were about to start setting up the larger art pieces created for the exhibition, receive the art pieces from other museums and finish up the final touches. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 health crisis meant that we had to reschedule this, as setting up and opening the exhibition is no longer possible.

Considering all of the uncertainty around the development of this global pandemic, the reopening of museums and distributing of art pieces, we decided to postpone the exhibition to next year. It will now be open to the public from 9 April to 29 August 2021.