Adventurous Wine Architecture

Just as winemakers blend grapes from different lots to achieve a ideal result, so are architects at work combining tradition and innovation, agriculture, technology, production and hospitality to create today's wineries.

This is according to architectural writer Michael Webb, whose recently published work, "Adventurous Wine Architecture" is featured in a new show at Copia: The American Center for Food, Wine and the Arts.

In the past decade there has been "an explosion of creativity" in winery architecture, Webb writes in the prologue "Building for Bacchus."

"The popular image of a winery remains the picturesque European chateau, but a growing number of winemakers around the world are seeking a new approach."

Webb and photographer Erhard Pfeiffer focus on an international sample of these wineries, most of them built within the past five years, in not only in newer wine regions like California, Chile, Australia, Canada and Argentina, but in some of the oldest wine regions of the world including Italy, Spain and Austria.

Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano, Steven Holl, Herzog & de Meuron, Santiago Calatrava, Rafael Moneo, Glenn Murcutt, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster are among the distinguished international architects who have been commissioned to build new wineries and the results are a