| Can I Supersize That Winery, Please? | | | | By: Steve Stevens |  Page 1 of 2 next >> |
Christian Moueix’s heralded Napa Valley winery, Dominus, is closed to the public, but anyone standing next to the building could probably see inside of it anyway.
The winery’s walls are made of jagged blue and black basalt stones piled simply and deliberately into stainless steel baskets. On sunny days, streaks of light shoot through the gaps between the stones to the floor inside; there is no mortar at work here. And the building so cleverly imitates the Yountville countryside, that even from a modest distance, the winery can appear to melt into the scenery and disappear from view.
According to Moueix, “Napa Valley is a special place, and we wanted the winery to be a part of the landscape.”
Swiss architects Jaques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who three years ago won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of a Nobel, designed Dominus in 1997. Another Pritzker winner, the legendary Frank O’ Gehry, is set for a multi-million dollar redesign of Napa’s Kathryn Hall Vineyards’ estate and is also building what he calls a “cathedral of wine” for Le Clos Jordan.
Undeniably, we exist in an age where it is entirely common for superstar architects to build super-expensive wineries, and that raises an important question. Are these wineries just examples of plutocrats with big wallets and bigger egos building the priciest toys they can afford? Or do all these fancy buildings actually serve a useful purpose? It is, of course, a question of wine, so not surprisingly, the French play a part in the answer.
In Bordeaux, It’s The ‘Dough’ That Counts
In any conversation about world-class wine, the French region of Bordeaux is bound to come up quickly. In terms of the quality of its wines, the depth of its history and tradition, and the sheer breadth of its wine operations, Bordeaux does not really have an equal.
Alain Salomon, an associate professor of architecture at Columbia University’s Paris-based graduate school of architecture program, says there is something else in Bordeaux that is not easily rivaled: the physical beauty of its legendary winemaking chateaus.
“Bordeaux is indeed the most perfect example of the 18th century world in France,” Salomon says. “The decline it went through in the 19th century seems to have preserved many of the great wine chateaux as practically perfect examples of Baroque architecture.”
What’s more, these estates played a crucial role in selling Bordelais wine. At one time, merchants entertained buyers at their chateaus because in Bordeaux, there wasn’t really any place else for them to stay. As wine writer Frank J. Prial recently wrote in his New York Times’ column, “Actually, hotels—and restaurants, too, for that matter—are a relatively new phenomenon in Bordeaux.”
According to Prial, chateaus became increasingly lavish as the powerful shippers who owned them vied for the attention of buyers who had traveled there looking to buy wine. This was a lesson not lost on winemakers and architects across the Atlantic.
Daniel Nichols, a Sonoma County, California architect, says he has seen the winery-as-marketing-tool concept really take off there.
“The marketing is (now) the winery itself,” Nichols says. “The wine is almost secondary. When you go into most wine shops, you see so many products that are not wine, have nothing to do with wine. Wine jewelry, wine aprons. The wine is an aspect, but winemakers have figured out that tourism is all about the experience. They figured out what tourists want.”
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