Barco del Corneta is a small artisan winery, known for its white wine matured in oak barrels, whose brand image is a paper boat. Its owners have been looking for a space where they can make and care for their wines for a long time, and they found it in the heart of the urban area of the castilian village of La Seca: a plot with a house to live in, a winery where they make wine and an old winery cave underground where to breed it.
The main problem to solve was to integrate a large volume, such as an industrial warehouse, in an urban environment, in the historic center, which would accommodate all the tasks to be carried out in the winery: reception of the grapes, pressing, fermentation, maturation, bottling and storage, as well as a tasting area, office, toilets and laboratory, all in just 300 m2.
The barrel maturation was clearly going to take place in the underground cellar. All you had to do was connect the crafting hall with the existing cave. To do this, a concrete cube was inserted that descends 5 m until reaching the mouth of the cave, housing the access ladder and the large forklift necessary for the transfer of barrels.
For everything else there was the new building, conditioned by the location of the winery (which was maintained) and the connection with the buried cellar. The interior is spacious, since there are hardly any compartments, except for the necessary ones: the toilets and the installation room. The rest of the functions are qualified by the roof, which becomes the protagonist of the project, because is an interior construction, surrounded by walls, and it does not have facades.
The roof skirts are broken up into several smaller inclined planes, playing with different inclinations and slopes with three purposes: one, functional, so that it defines and characterizes the different work areas inside, but without compartmentalizing, allowing the entry of natural light where it is needed and with the required orientation; two, urban planning, so as to volumetrically integrate the building into the plot of small roofs, avoiding a resounding volume that breaks the harmony of the urban environment; and three, symbolic, because the logo and commercial image of the winery is a paper boat , and this shape is noticeable from the surrounding vineyards and the access road to the town, which, being sunken, allows us to notice the set of white roofs of the winery among those of the farmhouse, standing out as an inserted object but at the same time integrating it into the whole .
The interior is accessed from the loading yard through a large sliding gate. The center of the warehouse is where the stainless steel fermenters will be located, which due to their size require a higher space. The winery loses its original function, but its flooring and volume are maintained as the most representative area of the winery, the tasting area, illuminated by a large polycarbonate panel facing south but protected by the shade of the large porch of the loading yard. Above the winery, occupying half the volume, sits the office, in an elevated position, from where the entire space is controlled.
The toilets and changing rooms are enclosed in a small wooden box, under the lowest section of the roof, since it does not require too much hight. This lowering of the roof, in front of the central area of the fermenters, allows the opening of another large diamond-shaped window that introduces natural light into the center of the space, and as it is oriented to the north it does not interfere with the interior temperature.
Constructively, very cheap materials have been used, trying to make the most of their benefits. For a winery it is important that the interior temperature does not suffer large variations. This is easy in the buried cave, where the wine will mature at an almost constant temperature throughout the year. In the manufacturing warehouse, it has been resolved with thermoclay block enclosures, seen from the inside. This material provides sufficient thermal inertia necessary to control internal thermal changes. The exterior is covered with sprayed polyurethane insulation covered with a white mini-wave sheet, so that it reflects excess solar radiation. The roof is resolved with a sandwich panel made on site, with 20 cm of rock wool, finished inside with the same white mini-wave sheet and with OSB wood board marking the profile of the silhouette of the paper boat, making it recognizable from the inside. In turn, the minionda plate recalls the furrows of the plowed lands that surround the municipality. The concrete floor is covered with continuous resin, necessary for hygiene due to the frequent washing of the flooring, choosing a light blue color in reference to the wine label, where the paper boat floats in an undulating blue sea.
