THE WORLD WINERY COLLECTION. innovative design, sustainability and the landscape

The relationship between wine and architecture has never been as strong as in the last two decades; proof of this is the diversification of tourism into multiple “specialised” forms, including wine tourism in signature wineries, a phenomenon that is currently expanding throughout the world. Wineries have been transformed from simply being buildings for the production of wine into places dedicated to technological discoveries, wine tastings, the exaltation of sensory perceptions and contact with prestigious architecture. The birth and constant expansion of wine culture no longer concerns only experts but touches an increasing number of people eager to approach the world of wine from multiple points of view. Wineries have, in some way, the ability to unite the diversity of their users by bringing them together in a single place, capable of satisfying, on the one hand, the need for new production spaces for an ever more sophisticated demand and, on the other, the wineries’ willingness to make investments and their growing interest in creating environments boasting great appeal and strong symbolic value. From Europe to the Americas, not to mention Australia, China and Japan, this volume presents a collection of the most interesting wineries in the world, each accompanied by a page illustrating the wines produced and their characteristics. Leafing through the book, one comes into contact with a wide-ranging geographical and stylistic compendium: from mimetic approaches in harmony with the territory to functional orientations in which productivity and technology are the protagonists. Massive buildings alternate with transparent or underground structures, and in the great variety of stylistic proposals the maturation of each selected building typology is clearly highlighted. What the projects selected here have in common is a strong link with their territory. In fact, all of them are set in rural environments of great prestige, even if at dramatically different latitudes, where non-trivial dialogue between architecture and nature is necessary. The projects show a clear intention to create a landmark in the territory surrounding them, transformed by the cultivation of grapevines: one of man’s oldest interventions on nature. The building simply becomes the symbol of this ancestral relationship. Each intervention welcomes and reveals the variety of the environmental and cultural context in which it is immersed, exalting the geological characteristics of the territory in which it stands. Starting from assumptions common to all winery projects, each of them arrives at a unique stylistic solution able to narrate the world of wine, to communicate the morphology of a territory and to attract those who wish to appreciate its complexity. This is how wineries are transformed into places for leisure and socialisation, but at the same time, corporate marketing tools with which to confirm the bond between the quality of the wine, the beauty of the territory and the wisdom of the company that produces it.