The client is a wine enthusiast who harboured a long‐time dream of creating a wine of class and prestige in Malta. He started off by purchasing a field with a small room on it. The site is situated in a very pleasant location with views towards Verdala Castle and Siggiewi with its distinctive domed church. Over time, the estate was put together painstakingly by successive purchases of parcels of land adding to the original holding towards the south. It now consists of 4 hectares of fields sloping gently northwards. The first building consisted of three rooms and an għorfa at first floor reached via an external stone staircase. The għorfa was topped by a reinforced concrete slab giving protection to what was a machine‐gun post in World War II. These rooms, including the concrete slab, were extensively and sensitively restored, but it was obvious that they were too small to accommodate such an extent of vineyard produce.
When designing the winery, it was the terrain which suggested the form of building, with a ground floor level at the end of the alley‐way and a basement level tucked into the scarp. In this way the mass of the building would always read as a single storey above the level of the fields.
The plan had to be very simple since the ground floor footprint was limited to 150 square metres. There is a main chamber, split up into two, with a barrel room to the south and a tasting room to the north. On either side of the chamber there are the circulation spaces; on one side a stairway rises from the basement through to roof level, while on the other there is a lift and a lavatory. This floor is set back from the line of the scarp while the basement underneath has its facade on the scarp line. This enables the tasting room to open onto a terrace with a panoramic view over the vineyards.
The basement was allowed to extend beyond the limited ground floor footprint and contains the industrial facet of the winery with presses, storage tanks, bottling room, and the spectacular concrete fermentation tanks of various sizes. The fermentation room partly underlies the terrace above and is roofed over with an exposed concrete waffle slab, which makes a suitable setting for the tanks. Beyond, there is a small wine library for the display of prestigious bottles, and further inwards there are three barrel‐vaulted cellars, built entirely of limestone. They are the culmination of the wine enthusiast’s dream. Underneath the cellars is a large reservoir to store harvested rainwater. Externally the winery is built in recycled stone to enable it to blend successfully in the rural setting.
