TASTEMAKERS
Napa Wineries With Architecture That Stops You
From Spill
18 wineries
Some wineries you visit for the wine and the building happens to be there. A smaller number reverse that. You slow the car down before you have any idea what is in the glass.
We asked which Napa buildings do that, and one reply arrived with ten names already in order.
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The modern statements
Opus One sits low and pale in the middle of Oakville like something excavated rather than built. Odette and CADE are the sustainable-design end of the conversation, both built to disappear into their hillsides. Continuum is high on Pritchard Hill and takes the view seriously. Quixote is the outlier and the delight, a Friedensreich Hundertwasser design with a gold onion dome and no straight lines anywhere, because he did not believe in them.
02
The historic end
Chateau Montelena is stone and ivy and looks like it was airlifted from the Rhone. Chappellet built a rusting steel pyramid on Pritchard Hill in 1969 that still reads as radical. Domaine Carneros put a French chateau on a hill above the Carneros flats and dared anyone to call it subtle.
03
The ones that reward a second look
Dana Estates, Miner Family and HALL St. Helena each do something specific with light, stone and scale that photographs badly and works in person.
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A note on how this list exists
Spill has an architecture tag in its data and no filter chip for it yet, which is exactly why a person had to tell us. That gap is being tracked. In the meantime this is the list, and it is a good one.
Hours and tasting details for all eighteen are on Spill.
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