Pour: A South African Winery That Buries Production and Lifts Hospitality Above the Vines

Most wineries that court tourists end up as two buildings pretending to be one: a shed where the wine gets made and a pavilion where it gets sold. Pour refuses that split. It puts the working winery underground, inside two large vaulted volumes pressed into a sloping vineyard. It then lets everything else (visitor circulation, restaurant, recreation, hotel) climb out of the terrain above them. The section does the storytelling. Descend and you are among the tanks; ascend and you are looking at mountains.

Designed by Tariq Almukhtar and shortlisted in Pour 2020, the proposal sits in the vineyard landscape of South Africa. It combines a working winery, visitor experience, hotel, restaurant, recreational spaces and panoramic viewpoints into a single route shaped by the natural fall of the site. The organising idea is vertical layering rather than a cluster of separate buildings. Production occupies the lowest stratum, public movement threads above and around it, and hospitality rises toward light and view.

A Landmark Box Above a Buried Building

The exterior view makes the strategy legible at a glance. A terracotta-clad volume, raised on columns and glazed along one side, is the only part of the complex that really announces itself. Vineyard rows run right up to the approach. Because the large functional areas sit below grade, vines can extend across portions of the building footprint. The hotel ends up working as a landmark above an otherwise landscape-integrated winery, and that contrast between buried and elevated architecture is the project's clearest signature.

Inside, the lobby holds onto the cellar's mood rather than shaking it off. It is dim, floored in parquet and lined with tufted benches, and light arrives through square ceiling openings in discrete shafts. That is a sensible threshold for a building whose heart is underground. Visitors adjust to a darker register before they descend, and the skylights hint that the ground plane above is occupied, possibly planted.

Tasting Beneath the Barrel Vault

The tasting room is where the cellar memory becomes literal. Brick barrel vaults arch over a long marble counter, and an arched window frames the barrels beyond. The project's rationale draws on the heavy masonry chambers in which wine has historically been fermented, matured and stored. Those spaces were valued for their separation from the outside climate and their enclosed, darker atmosphere. Here that heritage becomes the backdrop to consumption. The window matters most: it keeps the product's working environment in sight while you drink it, so the transaction never drifts loose from the place of making.

A Roof Terrace That Hands the Visitor Back to the Landscape

At the top of the sequence, the building opens out completely. A rooftop pool, sun loungers and umbrellas sit above the vineyard rows, with hills fading into haze. This is the culmination the designer describes, a roof terrace facing the surrounding vineyards and mountains. Its position in the section is the point. You earn the panorama by passing through enclosure first. The elongated form stretches along the contours, so different parts of the complex meet the ground at different elevations. The roof becomes one more level in that sequence rather than an amenity bolted on top.

Production as a Spectacle Seen From the Mezzanine

The underground vaults concentrate the technical stages of winemaking. The plans allocate space for grape delivery and crushing, fermentation, laboratory work, offices and staff facilities. The renderings show how carefully the two populations are separated without being hidden from each other. Conical steel fermentation tanks stand under the brick vault, with workers in hi-vis vests at floor level and visitors on a railed mezzanine above. In the maturation hall, a metal walkway runs alongside rows of steel tanks under warm pinpoint lights.

This is the most persuasive move in the scheme. Production gets the full height and the uninterrupted floor it needs. Tourism gets a parallel line of sight without stepping into the workflow. Stainless steel against warm brick also sets up a quiet argument. The vault is ancient, the process inside it is contemporary, and the visitor's elevated path lets them read both at once.

Why This Project Matters

Pour treats topography as a programming tool, not a constraint to be levelled. Industrial volume sinks into the slope and hospitality lifts out of it. The vineyard keeps its visual continuity, and the complex compresses its presence into a single legible landmark. It is a disciplined answer to a typology that often sprawls across the very landscape it sells.

The project's larger lesson concerns narrative. A visitor moves from the cool, vaulted tanks to the tasting counter to the rooftop pool, and that route traces the story of wine from grape to bottle through section and light. Some questions remain open, such as how the planted roof meets the hotel volume and how service and guest routes avoid crossing. Even so, Almukhtar's shortlisted entry makes a clear case that a winery can be read as a journey rather than just visited.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Tariq Almukhtar

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Project credits: Pour by Tariq Almukhtar Pour 2020 (uni.xyz).