Courtesy Ste. Michelle Wine Estates

When the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa, California needed building upgrades in the early oughts, founder and then-owner Warren Winiarski might well have commissioned any one of the world’s most famous architects for the project. His winery had put Napa on the map when Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars wines beat out competition from Bordeaux in a 1976 tasting contest in Paris. A quarter-century later, Winiarski had grown his business — and the international prestige of Napa Valley wines — so successfully that he could have invited a few Pritzker winners to submit proposals.

Instead, Winiarski turned to Javier Barba. The Barcelona-based architect had never built in the United States before, but no matter. Winiarski saw a photograph of the Spaniard’s 1995 villa for Lord Rothschild on the Greek island Corfu, a structure embedded directly into the surrounding mountainside, and was sold on the designer’s evident sensitivity to landscape. In 2000, Barba completed new cellars for Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. The labyrinthine complex, set in a low hillside near Winiarski’s vineyards, features a midcentury-inspired geometric arcade conceived by Barba as the point of entry for visitors....Continue Reading

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