Vital viticulture: deep in rural Northern Spain, this new complex of buildings for a wine estate draws on the simplicity and austerity of Iberian vernacular traditions.

With an expanding repertoire of overseas buildings (the latest being a monumental new cathedral for that most godless of cities, Los Angeles, AR March 2003), Rafael Moneo has become the world's Spanish architect sin igual. Being so internationally sought-after can often serve to dilute or debase the essential character of an architect's work, but this does yet seem to be the case with Moneo. His signature, Iberian-inflected architecture of mass, typified by alcazar-like walls enclosing elegant, neutral containers for works of art or worshippers, still travels well, equally at ease in such disparate locales as Stockholm or Houston.

For this latest project, however, Moneo has temporarily stepped off the international stage and gone back, quite literally, to his roots, to his native Navarre in northern Spain, where he was commissioned to design a winery in a remote rural site (a departure from his more familiar densely urban settings). Here, where the foothills of the Pyrenees meet the dry, dusty plains of the interior, the Chivite family has been making some of the best wine in the region--Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo--for at least II generations, deliberately keeping the yield low to maintain quality. At the end of the 1980s, the family acquired a former cereal farm known as Senorio de Arinzano, a 300 hectare spread extending along both sides of the meandering river Ega. Flat alluvial fields rise up from the river to meet undulating slopes and escarpments that have been in cultivation since the sixteenth century. Under the direction of Julian Chivite, father of the current generation of estate managers, extensive improvem ents were undertaken so that new vineyards could be planted without radically altering the existing topography or sacrificing the rich woodlands of oak, black poplars and ash. The effects of such scrupulous husbandry are manifest by the way in which the cultivated and natural landscape merge into one another in a rare reciprocity.

When Moneo first accepted the commission, he was confronted with a disparate array of agricultural and historic buildings, scattered randomly like chess pieces around the site. Of these, the most outstanding was the floridly entitled Palace of the Commander of the Arsenal, a squat stone tower embellished with statues. Its neighbours included a small nineteenth-century church dedicated to San Martin, and a dusky pink manor house dating from the eighteenth century. These have since been brought back into use as part of the estate; the Commander's Palace now houses workers' flats, the church has been restored and the manor house contains guest rooms.

Drawing on the unassuming vernacular of rural architecture, Moneo's new processing, storage, bottling, tasting and office buildings form a cordon around the existing trio of historic structures, their relationship consolidated and enhanced by newly planted geometric grids of vines and trees. Though much larger in scale, the long, low new additions echo the mass and solidity of their predecessors, with copper clad roofs and hermetic walls of plain, sand-coloured concrete meticulously hammered and worked so that it will eventually acquire a patina akin to weathered stone.

The arrangement of the new buildings is a functional expression of the winemaking process. The grape harvest is received and sorted in a colonnaded courtyard at the east end of the site, where an oversailing roof canopy shades and signposts the entrance to the great vat shed. Heavy oak doors, like those of a church, lead into a cool, cavernous cathedral of viticulture with its gleaming congregation of stainless-steel vats. By far the largest element in the complex, the vat shed docks nearly at right angles into the long, narrow bar of the barrel store and bottling plant. The cubic knuckle of the fermentation building, with three floors of temperature controlled rooms, acts as a hinge point between them. Almost monastic in their austerity, the different buildings have that dignified, muscular quality associated with industry; to some extent, the volumes and the equipment they house speak for themselves and this resonates with Moneo's innate spirit of elegant restraint. Possibly the most imposing space is the cask store, its roof supported by a colossal oak and stainless-steel truss that runs down its spine. The stacks of casks (made from French oak, the material employed by Moneo for the roof structure) can be surveyed from an elevated walkway, also supported by the truss.

The final stage of the winemaking cycle takes place in the bottling plant at the west end of the linear shed. Bottles are then stored or shipped from an adjacent loading dock, partly buried in the ground to minimize its impact. A small reception building with offices, reception and a room for tasting adjoins the bottling plant, reasserting a sense of human scale after the magnitude of the industrial spaces. Compared with the robust functionalism of the winemaking buildings, the tasting room is a theatrical, urbane flourish, with its wood panelling, open fireplace and rinsing basin for the quasi-religious rituals of sampling. A large projecting vitrine frames a view back over the winery and the three existing buildings, now rehabilitated.

Like a good vintage, the new buildings will improve with age, as the walls weather and the planting matures, softening the taut geometric forms of the architecture and strengthening the symbiosis between human intervention and the land. Both the built and natural landscape will reap the benefits of careful cultivation.

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Rafael Moneo, Madrid

Project team

Rafael Moneo, Michael Bischoff, Collette Creppell, Belen Hermida, Silvia de Anna. Francisco Gonzalez Peiro, Mariano Molina, Eduardo Miralles, Julio Oloriz, Pedro Elcuaz

Structural engineer

Jesus Jimenez Canas

Photographs

Duccio Malagamba