Silver Oak Winery’s Eco-Conscious, Barn-Like Transformation

The solar arrays on all the south-facing roofs contribute to the project’s LEED Platinum standing, as do other nearly invisible features. For instance, the asymmetrical production structures have large cutaway openings for cross ventilation and ease of entry. A frosted glass canopy over the grape delivery area creates a light-filled yet shaded area for harvest-laden trucks waiting to be unloaded. Between the banquet pavilion and tasting room, an orderly stand of birches provides more shade, and a long trough-like reflecting pond, clad in bronze by Chris French, is a cooling spot.

Despite many refined details borrowed from home design, Silver Oak’s modern buildings exude the essence of barns; their features are functional rather than merely historicist or decorative. In the fermentation room, rows of elegant digital speakers, resembling modern light fixtures, hang from the ceiling, filling the space with invigorating mariachi or Mozart music during the busy crush.

“The rest of the interior is clearly industrial, with stainless steel tanks and metal catwalks,” Duncan says. “We were not making the Taj Mahal. We just wanted to include beauty and simplicity, and those, we know from making wine, are the hardest things to achieve.”

Evoking Silver Oak’s distinctive black bottles with silver labels, the dark buildings with light-toned interiors are fitting intermediaries between out- side and in. Flamed basalt floors, the textural paneling of rough concrete planks, rift-sawn salvaged oak from Evan Shively’s Arborica — all subtly reflect the landscape.

Literally and metaphorically framing the vineyards, the buildings reflect the seasons. “When the vineyard is lush and green, the gray concrete inside comes into focus; during the winter when it is gray outside, you notice the wood paneling,” Piechota says. “I was after something you feel instinctively.”

Deep inside the banquet “barn,” which opens to a kitchen garden, is another evocative treat: a circular climate-controlled wine library that contains the earliest Silver Oak cabernet sauvignon vintages. Lined with charred Shou Sugi Ban tongue-and-groove redwood, the small room distinctly feels like the inside of a dark bottle of wine. Its black painted ceiling has a circular aperture for coved lighting, and through it you can look up — as if through the bottle’s neck — at a white plaster cupola that bounces light back into the room. A cylindrical floor-to-ceiling wine rack made of delicate steel rods also crafted by French hugs the room’s curved walls and surrounds a central table — an enormous basalt boulder with a glassy polished flat top — that looks as if it sprang from the site.

Despite the urban sophistication of the design, unveiled to the public last year, “David really wanted visitors to feel close to the land,” Piechota says. Duncan affirms that. In every sense, “I wanted visitors to be in the vineyard and have a connection to the earth and the fruit,” he says.

“Winemaking begins and ends with it.”