The south elevation is designed primarily around function and passive solar.

Monte Creek Ranch Winery

Landform Architecture

The Monte Creek Ranch Winery is a wine production space that promotes the winery’s sustainability principles by using its site's natural topography to embrace the principle of gravity-fed winemaking.

The winery needed to sit well with the tasting room, without demanding undue attention away from it.

Located on a steep hillside unsuitable for grape growing, the design incorporates a stepped profile to give operational access at each internal level. Highly visible from the South Thompson River and TransCanada Highway, the building’s scale and proportion were carefully considered to be visible for passers-by, but not to detract from the primary existing wine-tasting experience.

The addition as part of the linear extension of the valley sitting next to the Trans Canada Highway and the Thompson River.

The building uses precast concrete side walls and an internal steel structure to organise the layout into three levels.  The top level includes an expansive covered crush pad with offices and laboratories. The second level is the ‘ferment hall’ where grape juice is processed into wine.  The third and lowest level includes the bottling line, case storage, barrel storage, and loading. Earth sheltering is utilised to maintain and mediate temperature in the barrel storage room. Fresh air is drawn through 150-foot-long ‘earth tubes’ to further temper the building’s air supply - cooling the air in the summer, and warming it in the winter. Natural lighting strategies create a more comfortable indoor environment and decrease electrical lighting loads throughout the year. Given these sustainability strategies, the building can operate passively (without actively heating or cooling it) throughout most of the year.

In section, the building creates optimal space for gravity fed wine making as well sitting comfortably on the sloping part of the site.
Interior spaces are fine tuned for operations. Additional height allows for increased flexibility and future proofing.
The barrel room has its own beauty in its simplicity.
Garage doors on the high side of the room allow for direct access from the crush pad to the tanks.
The cascading levels are not only critically functional but offer long views up and down the building.