A new Niagara wine building uncorked

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There are two kinds of architectural discourse: technical or analytical, which is usually geared toward the practitioner; and the anecdotal or romantic kind, which is aimed squarely at the rest of us (and practitioners who still love what they do).

In this space, the gentle reader will always find the latter. Why? Because, as fascinating as it is to know how a building is put together or keeps from toppling over, without people a building is nothing but a shell. People add their hopes and dreams into that soft mortar as each brick is pressed into it. People fill their buildings with heirloom furniture, or bakery equipment, or a coffee drum roaster, or stainless-steel tanks to make wine. People scheme, celebrate, meditate and cry in their buildings.

And just as a barn on Bloor Street would stick out like a sore thumb, a building’s design – which is, after all, created by people – needs to relate and interact properly with its surroundings.

So, while architect Kaegan Walsh’s new building at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., for Ferox Winery might not stop traffic (other than thirsty folk) or grace the cover of Architectural Digest, it is the perfect building in the perfect place at the perfect time for winemaker Fabian Reis and his life/business partner, sommelier Stephanie Reis.

And all it took was a little kismet.

“We’d grown quite quick and we ran out of space,” Mr. Reis says. “And so I was just thinking, hoping, that I need to find an architect. … I started the ball rolling a little bit but wasn’t serious until I got an e-mail from Kaegan.”

Mr. Walsh, who’d e-mailed Ferox on a whim, picks up the story: “I’m not a wine connoisseur, but I collect wine … and you can’t beat a winery in terms of the beauty, right? Some of the nicest projects for architects are wineries; so that was one part of it, and then I was just discovering Ferox, and I’d wanted to meet you.”

It so happened, too, that their compatibility was off the charts, says Mr. Reis: “I looked at his portfolio … and it was exactly what [Ferox] is, and I thought ‘is this a dream?’”

Mr. Walsh’s portfolio can be rather dreamlike. His 7th Line House (concept) is a long, gabled, stark black form pierced in the centre by a glassy greenhouse for growing one’s own food; Millpond House (built) is a chunky split-level on steroids, inky-black against its forest setting; and the stars and snowflakes that swirl and outnumber the tiny gabled hut in Ice Hut Painting send a shiver up one’s spine.

So, too, is his production building for Ferox. Dark and brooding, but with a shallow gable so it doesn’t overpower the lush vineyards, the standing seam, 6,000-square-foot, metal-clad structure houses a phalanx of tanks, a pressing machine, an overhead highway system of pipes, and, underfoot, thick European tiles so strong they can handle “700 to 800 kilograms per tile.

“They’re very durable, they’re easy to move stuff on – that press weighs four and a half to five tonnes and we roll that over like butter with four guys – and it’s easy to sanitize,” Mr. Reis says of the $100,000 floor.

The investment into the floor, the new building as a whole, the renovation of the existing building on site, and a great many other things comes from a dedication to doing things differently. While the Stuttgart, Germany-raised Mr. Reis was born into a traditional winemaking family – his grandfather, Herbert Konzelmann, was a Niagara pioneer – it wasn’t until 2015 that he tried, with wife, Stephanie, to create his own product, which resulted in three barrels. This, of course, was after spending years earning his degree in viticulture, working for the family business, and then a stop in Sonoma, Calif.

Working with Art Institute of Orange County professor Herb Proske and his marketing students, the Ferox brand was born. Meaning “fierce” in Latin, it represented taking a risk. And while the company started out as a “virtual winery” (no bricks-and-mortar), the product was good enough that, by 2018, they could purchase Rancourt cottage winery, a place they’d been purchasing grapes from already.

A look at the non-tidy rows cradling Mr. Walsh’s handsome building is a clue to the unorthodoxy. Not only does Ferox not irrigate, their fields are overgrown. “Niagara has fairway vineyards … like going to a golf course,” Mr. Reis says.

“We’re trying to do a bit of the opposite; we don’t want to have a jungle vineyard [but] we’ve got very high cover-crops. We’ve got alfalfa clover, we’ve got some radish from last year [and] natural seeding [via manure]. We don’t till our soil … because we’re trying to trap carbon. We’ve got quite an ecosystem in our vineyard.” Ferox even leaves the weeds, and sprays pesticides just a few times a season (the average, says Mr. Reis, is 10 to 15).

All of these steps have gained Ferox the Ontario Viticulture Sustainability Certification and, more importantly, won them fans despite not being found in conventional stores.

Bold-yet-elegant, and respecting the land, the wine is much like Kaegan Walsh’s building: “I just want to be fairly simple, and functional with what I do, so the building itself is quite minimalist,” he says, his voice growing quiet as he turns to face the vines. “The vineyard has different personalities to it; you come here in the winter and everything’s dormant, and now it’s this beautiful bloom that’s happening.”