Aged to perfection

Aged to perfection
The shop and tasting room at R. Lopez De Heredia Vina Todonia winery is a mix of tradition and modernity

By Mark Faithfull, London Editor
March 01, 2008

Roland Halbe Fotografie

The fact that modernist, London-based architectural studio Zaha Hadid should be invited to contribute to the design of a traditional wine shop in a sleepy corner of rural northeast Spain would be surprising enough. But the R. Lopez De Heredia Vina Todonia winery in Haro—the heart of Spain's Rioja wine country—results in an unlikely pairing that is all the more striking.

Hadid says that she likes architecture to have "some raw, vital, earthy quality," a description which fits perfectly with the contemporary Lopez winery, which celebrated its 130th anniversary last year. Grapes are still cut from the vines with scissors and transported to the winery in conical wooden baskets. Fermentation takes place in 125-year-old oak casks maintained by in-house coopers. Racking is done by hand, as is bottling, corking and sealing the bottles with wax.

The shop and tasting room project evolved from an e-mail that fourth-generation wine producer Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia sent to Hadid after she discovered her work in 1995. Hadid agreed to design a wine-tasting pavilion, which was originally conceived as a display stand for a Barcelona food fair in 2002.

Hadid had history as her inspiration. Within the new pavilion, the client wanted her team to include an older wine-tasting pavilion that they had discovered in their [storehouses] and been restored, Hadid explians. "It had been originally commissioned by the great-grandfather [and founder] for the world fair exhibition in 1910," she adds.

Staff unearthed Don Rafael Lopez's hand-carved bar in one of the winery's storerooms, where it had laid disassembled, unloved and forgotten. Too tall to fit in any of the existing buildings, the antique bar became the inspiration for Hadid's work. In constructing the new pavilion, she encased it in the new freestanding steel building, which resembles a skewed wine decanter.

Having completed its duty at the Barcelona fair, the next stop for the pavilion was relocation to the partially completed bodegas (a Spanish term for "storehouse," a place for maturing wine) at Haro. This new pavilion would eventually be replaced by a new extension of cultural buildings on the site. As such, the pavilion was intended as "a bridge between the past, present and future development of the bodegas," Hadid explains.

The building is now nestled under a massive canopy, which dwarfs Hadid's structure, suspended from L-shaped cantilevering steel beams on one side. The pavilion itself provides an attractive and striking entry point to the whole winery. The exterior of the wine tasting room and shop is finished in gold-tinted steel. The interior is highly illuminated, clean to a minimalist extreme and ultramodern—and visible through the fully glazed entrance wall on the short side of the space. The modular struts of the interior steelwork, finished in white and uplit by concealed fittings, frame the angled walls of the store's compact space, and reach a near point at the top. The perimeters are furnished with benches also designed by Hadid, which run the length of the store and are made of wine-colored Corian. Freestanding chairs and tables sit at one end of the building, leading to the contemporary bar and wine store. The smaller, circular mahogany-finished stand from 1910 sits at the other end of the structure, linking this futuristic space to the winery's history.

The architectural studio developed the shape of the structure through the gradual deformation of a rectangular space in sections, moving from the back of the structure to the front, to end with what project architect Jim Heverin calls "a distorted memory shape resembling a decanter."

Hadid looks at the project in terms of an evolution. "For us, the starting point was to jump into the future to determine how the present would evolve," she says. "We began this project with a series of studies exploring how the bodegas could evolve. Working backwards from these studies, the pavilion began to emerge in tandem. The pavilion would house the past—the old pavilion. Made from timber and designed in a fin-de-scele style, the old pavilion became a jewel within the new container. Like a series of Russian dolls, the new pavilion itself was to be eventually housed within the new extension at the bodegas, making the new pavilion another layer."

The winery insists that the approach it has taken is far more than just a marketing gimmick. Rather, Hadid's structure is yet another element of an eclectic winery, joining other unusual structures on the site—including a colorful gingerbread observation tower built around 1886, a gallery-bridge of colored Belgian glass with Art Nouveau styling and an American windmill circa 1910. It is also another on the list of wineries in the region to have employed a famous architect to create a signature building; works by heavyweights Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Rafael Moneo are also featured in the local area.

"We have always been sensitive to beauty," says Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia, of the opening of the wine-tasting shop. "My great-grandfather designed a bodega 129 years ago, and half of it is to be built still. Our dream is to finish it."