As head winemaker of a newly renovated estate winery in Southern Ontario, Thomas Bachelder would argue the quality of the wine makes or breaks a project, but the design and layout of the site are equally important.
“The wine comes first, but the site makes the experience of trying the wine meaningful,” says Mr. Bachelder, founder of Domaine Le Clos Jordanne, which opened this month in the Niagara Peninsula’s Beamsville area. “It can’t just be any old building.
“People need to come to an attractive [place] that fits into the surroundings and helps them understand how we make the wine and what that involves. We can take people outside to the vineyards and explain [the process], but we also want them to notice the vineyards from inside, too.”
A commercial winery is a combination of business site, industrial operation, storage facility, retail outlet and tourist attraction. In Canada, it also has to comply with a maze of federal, provincial and municipal laws and regulations that apply to these types of properties.
A winery needs to showcase how the product is made but do so in a comfortable, compelling surrounding that doesn’t look like a factory, Mr. Bachelder says.
That’s a challenge for newcomers to an industry that already has some 185 wineries in Ontario. Niagara sites compete for tourists with other local Ontario wineries, such as those in Prince Edward County and the Pelee area. There are other national options in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and Nova Scotia, and internationally in California, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Wineries often vie for attention by putting up distinctive buildings for tastings, tours, dining and special events. In Niagara, sites include Jackson Triggs, a 45,000-square-foot structure with motorized glass doors and an outdoor summer-concert venue. Stratus, another winery nearby, is not only Canada’s first LEED-certified building, it’s the first winery in the world to meet this high environmental standard.
In July, a film festival about Italian winery architecture will be held in Toronto, followed by a panel discussion featuring winery experts. Some wineries try to build spectacular buildings, but for commercial winery developers, as French architect François Merlet writes, the ultimate goal “isn’t to build the most flamboyant building but to offer the most interesting design within a given budget.”
Le Clos Jordanne’s parent company, Arterra Wines Canada, has opted to renovate rather than replace the building at the Beamsville winery it purchased, formerly known as Angel’s Gate.
The building, a fantasy-castle structure with a vineyard view, constructed in 2006, has undergone a stylistic facelift. Fixtures and interior design were updated and some landscaping was done, including moving nearby vineyard buildings to offer an unobstructed view of the grape-lined hillside, says Shae-Lynn Mathers, managing partner of Solid Design Creative Inc., the Toronto-based firm that redesigned the site.
“We redid the furnishings, trying as much as possible to use craftspeople and materials from the area. We also commissioned a 2½-storey indoor sculpture by artist Pam Nelson, [who] used local materials,” Ms. Mathers says.
The Niagara wine region drew 2.6 million visitors in 2023, and it aims to attract three million by 2030, according to the umbrella group Wines of Ontario. It is expanding, with new wineries under construction, such as a Costco-sized, $40-million project called Stone Eagle Winery nearing completion in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
B.C. wine regions, which boast 341 licensed wineries, drew nearly 1.2 million visitors last year.
“The setting of the winery is important,” says Troy Ravndahl, estate manager at Nk’Mip Cellars, in Osoyoos, B.C., the first Indigenous-owned winery in North America. Osoyoos is in the Okanagan Valley, in a spot where there is a desert setting in one direction and the rainy, cooler western mountain climate in the other.
“We have an outdoor experience for our visitors. We want people to understand where they are when they’re here, to see the contrasting terrain on either side of the valley,” Mr. Ravndahl says.
Donald Ziraldo is chairman of Ziraldo Estate Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and co-founded Inniskillin Wines, which springboarded Niagara’s transformation from a producer of cheaper products to high-quality vintages. He says it’s a constant struggle to create winery buildings that make a visitor’s experience feel significant while respecting the surroundings.
In regions that don’t have long histories of winemaking, such as Niagara or B.C.’s Okanagan, winemakers must strive to strike a balance between fantasy and practicality for their sites – structures that dazzle but can also handle parking, deliveries and the seemingly endless flow of hoses and pipes required for all the steps in making wine, Mr. Ziraldo says.
Zoning is another complication. The Grape Growers of Ontario organization points out that “for municipal tax purposes, the exact square footage of the winery is assessed as industrial and the winery retail store is considered commercial, while the land they are on may be classed as agricultural.”
As Canada’s wine industry grows more sophisticated, wineries are likely to become even more competitive in their designs, says Mr. Ziraldo, who is a design consultant for wineries in Canada and Europe.
“People want to come to wineries that are distinctive-looking,” he says. “Some wineries hire big-name designers or well-known architects, but not everyone can afford this at first. You can usually find something on your property to work with.”
Finding a vineyard and an attractive site are only the start, he reiterates. “The building needs to be right – from the design and layout to the construction to how it looks and feels to the visitor who comes through the gate.”
