We look at the burgeoning trend of monumental wineries and wonder if architecture has turned into a mere advertising gimmick.

Text by Yvonne Xu
Images Courtesy of Bodegas Marqués de Riscal and Bodegas López de Heredia

When the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was completed in 1997, an architectural sensation called the Guggenheim Effect swept through the world. The phenomenon was this: the sinuous volumes and curved sheets on the titanium-clad museum dazzled the world, attracted more visitors than the population of the city itself, and placed Bilbao, hitherto obscure, firmly on the world cultural map. Add to this, it in the same stroke and with much deconstructivist aplomb also subverted all that was the archetypal museum—the symmetrical, the solid, the stately. Groundbreaking in aesthetics and in fact much like a quake, the Guggenheim Effect formula rippled through the rest of the architectural world, and global tourism learned to profit from eye-glue architecture.

This is certainly looking to be the case in the wine countries. Now, for as long as wine making and tourism were together in business, the European château has been the landmark of tasting routes—charming tourists with its the old world architecture as much as the vintage they produce. Post Guggenheim Bilbao however, wine countries turned their backs on the tried and tested château-vineyard formula, and started commissioning wineries to be built in designs worthy of world media attention. Many times these wineries are not only wine-producing centres, but also entire hospitality programs with hotels, viewing galleries, restaurants, and spas—all of them constituting what has become of wine connoisseurship, a multiple-consumable luxury product packaged by celebrity architecture.

To examine the phenomenon of crowd-bait designs, it is inescapable to mention the Spanish Marqués de Riscal Winery, built by the original who brought about the Guggenheim Effect. Frank Gehry gives to Marqués de Riscal his signature titanium and steel surface treatment. Enveloping the luxury hotel, restaurant, convention centre and spa are sheets that undulate in a panoply of metallic hues of pinks, silvers, and golds. When one takes time to walk about the winery—towards it, away from it, or surrounding it, the winery changes in light and time with new angles; lines move, chromatics shift, a continual rearrangement and turn of planes happen, perhaps more immediately spectacular and mesmerizing than the maturation of wine over time.

The building has been likened to sails on an ocean, dancers on the stage, an abstracted sculpture—all likely readings as Gehry is known to be an avid boater, have a self-professed interest in “the mutation of architecture and sculpture”. But to look at the winery building on its own, stripped from star status of its author, one wonders if the winery is really an experimental stance founded upon a genuine architectural interest, or if it is—granted, a new and unique aesthetic—but distilled purely from capitalistic forces.

To go back to discussion of revolutionary architecture, one must also mention Zaha Hadid, whose own person is an icon of revolution. Hadid translates the Lopez de Heredia Viña Tonodonia Winery in Haro, La Rioja, Spain in a literal representation by giving the entrance and cellar tasting room a distorted, memory shape of a decanter. While the expressionist warped form suggests the vagueness of inebriation, it also clearly points a sober mind to recall duck architecture – coined when a duck-shaped building was conceived to lure passersby into the poultry store it hosted within. Does one dare to ask, are award-winning architects building the same way a duck farmer in 1931 did, building to grab consumers’ attention, is architecture an advertising gimmick?

Surely these wineries make indisputable touristic and economic contributions. But more than these, they are certainly of great beauty and craftsmanship – so beautiful that they compel one to think that good architecture must not necessarily exclude consumerism, and that this brand of architecture must surely be more than a case of old wines being sold in new wineskins.