Ballin’s collection, which also includes glass, is the basis for the exhibition “Wine: Maps, Silver and Glass of the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries—with a Special Tribute to Thomas Jefferson, the Wine Connoisseur of the 18th Century,” on view at the Staunton’s R.R. Smith Center for History and Art August 6 to September 26.
A mostly D.C.-based health policy consultant, Ballin is a member of the board of the Staunton-Augusta Art Center, which occupies the Smith Center along with two other nonprofits: the Augusta County Historical Society and the Historic Staunton Foundation. “What we’re trying to do is to get the organizations to do something together, because often people are off in their own little silos,” he says. “I’ve combined wine with history and art, because the Smith Center is the art and history museum.”
Wine is what ties together this exhibit. As Ballin says, “Everybody loves wine, and we’re in wine country.” A sizeable number of the roughly 300 maps he owns depict the wine-growing regions of Europe, so one part of the exhibition will feature 40 of them, mostly French, some of them more than 400 years old (Ballin’s favorite is a 1578 Ortilius map of Burgundy).
The second, more interdisciplinary part of the exhibition includes seven of Ballin’s maps detailing the places Thomas Jefferson visited in his 1787 trip to France’s wine country, including Leon, Avignon, Bordeaux and Burgundy. Jefferson is said to have described the three-and-a-half month trip as the most delightful period of his life, and he took many notes with an eye toward growing wine in his home country.
“He really was the wine connoisseur of Europe,” says Ballin. “He was also sending thousands of bottles of wine back to the U.S., to George Washington—he was basically Washington’s sommelier.”
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