Vintage Rogers

If any industrial building can raise the spirits, it is surely a winery. In recent years, wine makers across the world have recognised the marketing potential of bucolic premises and brought in famous architects to make the most of them. Herzog & de Meuron and Michael Graves have designed wineries in the USA, Steven Holl’s made his mark on Austria, as have Mario Botta in Italy and Frank Gehry and Rafael Moneo in Spain.

Now it’s the turn of the bon viveurs at Richard Rogers Partnership. Presented with a triangular site by a wine maker from the village of Peñafiel near Valladolid in northern Spain, the practice came up with “a modern representation of traditional wine construction”. The result, currently under construction, could be taken as the most traditional building every undertaken by Rogers. But then, the tradition it refers to is the Spanish art noveau of Antoni Gaudì and his contemporaries, who introduced functional engineering to industrial buildings.

The winery is contained below five parallel barrel-vaulted roofs that adopt the most structurally efficient parabolic form, as pioneered by Gaudì. The vaults are supported on elegant laminated timber arches and covered in large terracotta tiles. The result echoes the hilly Countryside and the traditional village buildings.

Beneath the vaults lies the main production line, where grapes are delivered by lorries to be put into fermentation vats. In the cellar beneath that, the wine matures in barrels and bottles, well insulated from changes in temperature.

Along one side of the triangular site lies a narrow two-storey strip of offices, a small auditorium, wine-tasting area and a public viewing gallery. The strip is parted in the middle to enclose an elliptical sunken courtyard, which channels daylight into the offices and neatly frames views of the castle on the hill overhead.

When it is completed next year, Bodegas Protos promises to raise the spirits of its visitors. And that’s even before the tasting begins …