The Wine​

If food is the fuel for the body, then wine is the drink of the soul. Drinking is a journey. From the moment you select your wine, you start engaging with the complex history of the wine creation, from family traditions, stories and process to storage... As you open your bottle, the aroma transports you to the winery where many stories unfold. You savour the wine and appreciate the love that the wine maker has poured to produce an amazing wine for you to enjoy and savour, with friends and family.

The Journey

As we leave the car park, we get in the cable car where our journey begins. We fly over the lake where the water is collected from the wine museum waterfall. As we are cruising along, we are suddenly taken through a dark and narrow tunnel until the cable car stops within an expansive egg shape lobby. After purchasing our tickets and looking at the programme of the journey, we choose to make way back to the cable car as we decided to head to the sky bar at the top of the museum for lunch. We enter another dark tunnel before we realise we are being elevated by steel thread, up and above the waterfall and the lake below, spiralling around the wine museum building. Taking in all the visual delights of the stunning views across the city and the mountain side, we land in a space where grapes are almost suspended from the sky. We sit down for a nice meal, savouring the wine and picking up grapes grown through an aquaculture system for dessert. We go down afterwards to visit the period showrooms through the gentle ramps that link each period showroom. When we return to the lobby, we decide to visit San Cristobal and other areas of the park before we come back for supper to taste the wine in the auditorium in the waterfall tower. We finish our journey savouring the wine in a sweeping 360-degree visual feast on the balcony listening to the waterfall below.

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Built and Non-Built Environment

Our concept was inspired by the elegant free flowing form of the wine decanter. The wine museum is designed as almost a vessel that sits surrounded by the natural contours of the valley, while anchored within the waterfall and the new lake. We wanted to create a journey for the visitor that linked the wine museum, San Cristobal and the surrounding park area. The cable acts as a link between the elements - air, water and earth – that physically produce the wine. The built museum is designed to have multiple skin façade in ETFE film which is might lighter than glass that will transmit more light. Allowing multiple ventilated voids in between will provide adequate insulation and natural air. ETFE is a self-cleaning material which will reduce maintenance for the wine museum. Having transparent skins will be an advantage to lit the towers at night acting as landmarks for the city and to reflect the surrounding green landscape during the day.

Presently, the built environment has departed from nature and appears as a collection of isolated objects. Our project mimics nature and its elements in the wilderness as well as integrates existing elements that aren’t being utilized. For instance, we intend to use the existing canal system to create a beautiful lake to store the water from the wine museum to be reused as a combined system of permaculture and aquaculture will be used to grow vines on and around the wine museum. We use accessible ramps to be accessed by everybody instead of stairs. We want visitors to slow down instead of rushing through.