Dominus Winery

The winery, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and built in 1996-1998, is located in Napa Valley, California, USA. The winery is private, and its owner is Christian Moueix. The main aim for Herzog & de Meuron was to combine the winery with the landscape, proving that the vineyard is also important. 

This is the first project of architects in the USA. Besides the winery, the building houses offices. There are three functional zones in the winery: the tank room for the first stage of fermentation, the cellar where wine matures, and the storeroom where wine is bottled and stored before it is sold. Most of walls are made of glass to let people understand and see what is happening inside the winery and to look at each process.

The main problem of this project was climate - very hot by day, very cold at night - architects should solve this problem. And they design a structure just by gabions which perfectly meets the weather conditions of this area . Added to the walls, stones form a mass that insulates the building against heat by day and cold at night.

Where it is needed the stones lies to each other very close not letting the light get in. “It is kind of stone wickerwork with varying degrees of transparency, more like skin than like traditional masonry” Herzog & de Meuron.