Metropolis - January Sample 2008

Interior designer Die go Burdi created
different effects for Stratus’s
tasting rooms. In the larger one (left
and far left), a glass wall reveals
French-oak barrels in a climate-
controlled cellar. The other room
(below) has oiled end-grain-
mesquite walls.

TASTING ROOMS

“I wanted people to really feel good about the environment that they were tasting our wines in, and to come back,” Feldberg says.

a building that would allow them to make the best possible wine and offer the best experience to surround and support the tasting (and selling) of that wine. And green design helped them do that.

From the beginning, the architecture was driven by the wine-making process. “It was a gravity winery, and there are height restrictions in Niagara-on-the-Lake, so we had to create the maximum height we could within the restrictions of the zoning,” Andrew explains. The resulting four-story,

18,500-square-foot box that houses the production facilities is also unusually large given Stratus’s relatively low annual yield. (It produces about 10,000 HAND-SORTING cases of wine a year; some of its neighbors produce ten times that amount.) But to circumvent pump-

ing, the equipment itself had to be movable, and this required space. The destemming and sorting machine is on wheels so that grapes can be dropped directly into the fermentation vats (the only pieces of equipment that are immobile). And near the center of the building, elevator tanks carry the wine to the top of the building to facilitate continuous gravity-feeding.

Just as the form of the building was dictated by the wine-making, so too was the geothermal heating-and-cooling system tailored to Groux’s needs. “That is a great tool for a winemaker,” Groux says. “ Because with the geothermal the same media is going to allow you to cool or to heat.” In fact, the ground-loop system—which is powered by 24 wells drilled to an average depth of 225 feet—is ideally suited to a winery. “In the late fall,” continued on page 129 79

On the top floor of the production building, grapes pass through a destemming machine, then vibrate along two sorting tables, where workers pick out any bad fruit.