Wine v. Rockefellers?

I often wonder what the

Vintners buy

One half so precious as the

Stuff they sell.

--Omar Khayyam

Among countries where wine is considered less precious than cash are France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Hungary, Tunis and Greece.

Covertly these nations have been perfecting means to sell more wine for more cash. Four years ago they signed not a secret but a very discreet treaty which became operative last year, establishing The International Wine Bureau, in Paris. Although the treaty was duly deposited with the League of Nations, it has never been officially printed. But perhaps its quasi-secret text came last summer under the eye of John Davison Rockefeller III, undergraduate grandson of John D. Rockefeller I, who worked during vacation as an information clerk at the Secretariat of the League of Nations (TIME, July 16), peered into many a document, and returned in September to Princeton--where even charladies know that the House of Rockefeller is firmly dry.

Scarcely surprising, in view of the above circumstances, was the issuance last "week by Ivy Lee & Associates (spokesoffice for the House of Rockefeller) of an expose and privately made translation of the treaty establishing The International Wine Bureau. "Such a plan," declared Ivy Lee & Associates, "constitutes in effect an anti-prohibition campaign, at least in so far as the sale of wine is concerned."

Scanners of the treaty thought it a slender theme for the exercise of Mr. Lee's imposing talents. The Wine Bureau will merely attempt to develop the international wine trade, "in accordance with the laws of each country," by releasing data "tending to demonstrate the beneficial effects of wine," and by sponsoring laboratory experiments "to demonstrate the hygienic qualities of wine and its influence as an agent in the fight against alcoholism (i.e. against "hard liquor")."