Ysios

Undulating like a space-age monster over the Rioja landscape, Calatrava’s 2001 winery for Ysios has become the region’s prime architectural landmark.

While more traditional winemaker Marques de Riscal commissioned Frank Gehry to build it a mini-Bilbao Guggenheim-style hotel across the valley, Calatrava’s design for Bodegas and Bebidas fulfils its brief of reflecting Ysios as a pioneer among wine’s Young Turks making Rioja in a more daring and contemporary style.

There’s more to this design than good looks: Calatrava had to work within a site with height variations of up to 10m. He chose to celebrate this quirk by topping two concrete walls nearly 200m long with a wavy roof of wooden beams clad in aluminium. It reflects the sunlight like a beacon, and pays homage to the line of mountains it sits beneath.

The cedar cladding of the south-facing wall is intended to allude to the wine barrels inside, while the narrow west and east facades are clad in aluminium panels to provide continuity with the roof.

Form over function? You could argue that, given the roof has leaked since the winery was completed, according to the owners, who lodged a suit against Calatrava and builders Ferrovial in 2013 for nearly £2m worth of repairs. But it’s a breathtakingly beautiful building that has certainly put Ysios on the map.

Salentein

As austere as the winds that whip around it in the foothills of the Andes, Eliana Bórmida and Mario Yanzón’s winery for Bodegas Salentein reflects the structural magnificence of the owner’s award-winning wines.

The brief, handed over in the late Nineties, was to create a ‘cultural space’ within Argentina’s Mendoza wine-growing area in which art and music would play almost as great a part as viniculture. So there is a separate art gallery as well as a subterranean auditorium at the centre of the cross-shaped winery where intimate concerts are performed against a backdrop of concentric circles of wine barrels - it’s believed they benefit from a dose of classical music.

The building, which sits at an altitude of 1,200m in the Uco Valley within 49 ha of desert-like terrain, is quiet rather than showy, distinguished by its scale, the use of local stone in many colours - yellow quartzite, green chlorite and red limonite sandstone - and the way the building has been sited, framed by vineyards and against a theatrical backdrop of snowcapped peaks.

The project not only kicked off wine tourism in the Mendoza region, but the architects’ careers - Bórmida y Yanzón has since gone on to create more award-winning wineries in the area.