Steel, stone and sky - Herzog and de Meuron's architectural design for a winery in the Napa Valley, California

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Annette Lecuyer

Elevating unassuming raw materials and basic industrial construction Herzog and de Meuron's winery in the Napa Valley elegantly fuses the rational with the sensuous to make poetry out of economy.

The Napanook Vineyard, located near Yountville, California, has been cultivated since 1866. The Dominus wine produced there since 1983 by new proprietor Christian Moueix of Bordeaux has attracted such international acclaim that it was decided to build a winery on the site. The Moueix family commissioned Herzog & de Meuron in 1995 and the first bottling of a Dominus vintage took place in the new building in May this year. While many California vineyards pander to the public with extravagant roadside buildings which try unconvincingly to evoke an 'olde worlde', Dominus assumes a different posture. Not open for public degustation, the winery is set back from the road in the heart of the vineyard. The architecture is reticent, even aloof, an understated complement to the very high quality of Dominus wine.

The building is a simple two-storey box 140m long by 25m wide with its long axis running north-south. The box is punctured by two covered passages which separate the functional components of the building. At the north end are the cask cellar and store at the ground level with administrative offices above; all other areas are double height, with the tank room in the central band, and the bottling facility, warehouse and electrical plant at the south end. The north portal aligns with the major east-west access road from the highway which passes through the building and continues on into the vineyard. The open-air portico so created houses entrances to each of the major spaces of the winery, including the tasting room and cask cellar, the offices and the tank room. The south portal provides a covered outdoor space between the tank room and warehouse which serves as a bottling and boxing area and as a loading bay. Parking for staff and invited visitors is unobtrusively provided in a single file along the entire length of the rear west facade.

The winery is of conventional economic warehouse construction with a concrete ground slab, site-cast concrete columns, beams and tilt-up walls, and a precast concrete plank roof. This solid, introverted construction gives way to a steel frame on the upper level at the north end of the building where the offices are located. While the box is conventional, the cladding is not. Just as the sinuous copper cladding of the Signal Box 4 Auf dem Wolf in Basle also acts as a Faraday cage to protect the electronic equipment inside, so the skin of Dominus is both handsome and functional. Galvanized steel gabions, widely used in river and highway engineering as retaining structures, are filled with loose crushed basalt typically used as the sub-base for road construction. Here the caged stone takes on a new role as rainscreen and, through the modulation of both light and heat, tempers the interior environment of the building.

The gabions, imported flat-packed from Switzerland, were assembled and filled with local rock on site. They bear on a perimeter grade beam and are restrained by ties to stainless steel rods cast into the concrete wall panels and, in the areas which are framed, by brackets from the steelwork. Using a single module of 900 x 450 x 450mm for the entire building, enormous variety is achieved by very frugal means. Three sizes of mesh are used: the largest is the 75mm square grid of the gabion; an intermediate gauge of screen is added to the gabion at the base of the walls to prevent rattlesnakes from nesting among the rocks; and the finest 5mm mesh is used for balustrades and suspended ceilings.

Likewise, three grades of stone are used. The largest and least densely packed, which is permeable to light and ventilation, is used for the walls of covered outdoor areas and the tank room. Because the fermentation tanks themselves are insulated and fitted with sophisticated temperature controls, the environment of the tank room is not critical. The space is permanently vented at high level by the coarse stone screen combined with a window screen in the back-up wall. By day, filtered sunlight is allowed into the tank room and by night, the facade glows like the embers of a dying fire. A closely packed smaller grade of stone which clads the cask cellar and warehouse is opaque to light and provides a stronger barrier against temperature changes in these sensitive areas.Within the cask cellar, in lieu of a slab, oak barrels rest on concrete sleepers on crushed basalt so that humidity from the earth can permeate the room to assist in maturing the wine. This same grade of fine basalt is used as loose ballast on the roof. The mantle of stone acts as a thermal buffer which insulates the building. Only the offices a small area of this large structure - have mechanical heating and cooling. The environmental strategy of the building is thus dominantly passive rather than mechanical and, more importantly, in the realm of architecture rather than services - a radical approach in the land where air conditioning is king. Dominus is not about high-tech California winemaking, but about an intimate relationship with the site exemplified by both the wine and the building.