Wine Temple: A Rammed Earth Winery That Turns the Vineyard into a Gallery of Framed Views

Stand in a vineyard with mountains on the horizon and you see everything at once, which often means you see very little. Vine rows, fields, peaks, sky and shifting light dissolve into one generous but undifferentiated panorama. Wine Temple starts from that observation and makes an argument with it: the richness of a landscape is easier to grasp when architecture holds most of it back. The project treats the winery less as a sealed industrial shed and more as an instrument for looking, a sequence of walls, passages and openings that hands the territory to visitors one frame at a time.

Designed by Paco Julia, the scheme received a People's Choice Award in the Pour 2020 competition. Its brief is broader than production. The building is meant to reveal how grapes become wine while tying that process to the vineyards, mountains, climate and communities that give the region its identity. A low horizontal base appears to grow out of the slope and gradually separate from it, forming a constructed platform. Above it rises a single monumental volume, the maturation temple, which anchors the whole composition.

A Low Plinth That Peels Away from the Slope

The presentation board sets out the project's essential grammar. In the north-east elevation, a long, low rammed earth body hugs the ground while a pyramidal volume breaks the skyline. The stepped axonometrics show how the base emerges from the terrain instead of sitting on it, and the aerial plan places the complex squarely among the vine rows, its orthogonal footprint borrowing the discipline of the planting.

That pairing of horizontal and vertical is the most legible decision in the scheme, and a well reasoned one. The linear order of the vineyard becomes the plinth; the irregular silhouettes of the surrounding mountains find an answer in the temple's emphatic form. The building reads as a piece of the site rearranged, not a monument dropped onto it.

Heavy Walls That Edit the Panorama

Here the scale shifts to the body. A rammed earth wall and a concrete overhang rise beside the vine rows, a figure looks upward, and a rocky hill sits behind. The wall's solidity is the point. Julia's long elevations stay close to the ground and remain largely closed, so the openings that do occur carry real weight. Mass and void alternate, and the vineyard arrives in fragments rather than as one continuous image.

Walls in this project do several jobs at once: they direct movement, regulate light, mark thresholds and frame the view. Earth as the primary material strengthens the claim that the building comes from the ground it surveys, and it gives the facades a stratified, terroir-like texture that a smoother finish would lose.

Production Spaces Sunk Below the View

The fermentation hall is the most generous interior shown. Steel tanks are sunk into the floor under a concrete waffle ceiling, and glazing runs out to the vines. Lowering the tanks keeps the room's horizon clear, so the working equipment and the vineyard share the same line of sight, and the visitor sees the raw material and its transformation together. The coffered ceiling gives the hall a measured rhythm that suits a space built around repetition and patience.

The adjacent corridor reverses that openness. A narrow rammed earth passage is lit by a single warm strip of light, with steel basins on either side. This is the compression the scheme depends on: visitors move between tight interiors, open galleries, courtyards, production spaces and terraces, and each shift resets their sense of scale before the next view appears. The production areas sit within or beneath the landscape, a sensible move for spaces where stable conditions matter.

Passages Framed Like Paintings, and Patios That Hold the Sky

This open passage is the clearest demonstration of the gallery idea. Rammed earth walls and a concrete beam ceiling bracket a green field of vines and a single peaked hill, composed almost like a canvas on a wall. Julia describes moving through the building as walking through an art gallery in which the surrounding territory is the exhibition, and this image makes the comparison literal. Because the opening is selective, the hill becomes a subject instead of background.

The same logic extends to the hotel level at the top of the complex, which works as a panoramic platform. Where production is buried, the accommodation meets the horizon directly. Open patios cut into the hotel plan bring in daylight, ventilation, vegetation and sky, creating protected internal landscapes so that rooms are not forced to rely only on outward views. It is a considered counterweight to the exposure of an elevated deck.

A Conical Chamber Where Ageing Becomes Ritual

At the centre stands the maturation temple, a monumental chamber for the ageing and tasting of wine. The interior view shows a tall, conical earthen space with a diagonal shaft of sunlight falling across stacked barrels while a visitor stands below. Overhead light, a narrowing volume and a slow, dim atmosphere turn a technical stage of production into the emotional core of the complex.

This is where the project earns its name. Ageing is the least visible part of winemaking, a matter of time, not activity, and Julia gives it the most expressive architecture on the site. The single beam of light reads as a clock as much as an effect, tracking the hours across the barrels and making time, the one ingredient no one can see, something visitors can watch.

Why This Project Matters

Plenty of winery proposals chase the view with floor-to-ceiling glass. Wine Temple goes the other way, and the restraint is its strength. By keeping most of the landscape behind earthen mass and releasing it in deliberate frames, the project makes a familiar vista feel newly authored. It also refuses to separate the visitor experience from the work of making wine: tanks, basins and barrels sit inside the same choreography as terraces and patios.

For competition entrants, the lesson is coherence. A single idea, slowing down the act of looking, governs the section, the material, the circulation and the hierarchy of spaces, culminating in a chamber that treats time as architecture. The People's Choice recognition at Pour 2020 suggests that audiences responded to that clarity, and rightly so.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Paco Julia

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Project credits: Wine Temple by Paco Julia Pour 2020 (uni.xyz).