Shared Approach to Winemaking Creates a Community-Focused Destination and Supports Small Businesses

Unlike traditional winery typology which focus on an individual producer, District Wine Village is a destination that brings numerous wine producers together in a single destination. The Village features a circular, master-planned site with multiple buildings surrounding a grand public plaza, which supports a collaborative approach to the winery experience. With shared access to equipment and infrastructure, the Village offers a lower threshold of entry to winemaking. This new concept, the first “Wine Village” in Canada, provides unprecedented opportunity to small winemakers in a community-focused development.

At the heart of District Wine Village is a large, circular common plaza — providing opportunities for gathering and community functions. Reaching heights of up to 40 feet — the plaza is embraced by a series of cross-laminated timber columns, bound by custom-steel screening bands. Shelter in the summer months is provided by a distinct, pinwheel-shaped canvas canopy. This structure reinforces the community gathering space, and architecturally relates to the axes of the Village master plan. Here, a wide-range of events are planned through the year — from concerts, to wine and culinary demonstrations, farmers markets and ice-skating in the winter months. This is a dynamic and ever-changing space, and forms a visual relationship with the surrounding Village buildings.

The Village’s central plaza is overlooked by 16 surrounding buildings on equal-sized plots of its circular site. HDR designed a typical floorplan to be shared by three building forms — allowing for standardized function, yet variety within the Village’s architecture. Each floorplan offers a small public tasting space, and back-of-house areas that can be configured for winemaking, brewing, or distilling functions. These are simple and rugged working structures — easily constructed from mass-timber or light-wood framing, and clad in durable wood and metal finishes. Each building is surrounded by natural landscaping, and features a patio and water feature overlooking the central plaza. A Culinary Experience building — featuring extensive mass-timber and CLT construction — provides a grounding point for visitors experiencing the central plaza to purchase food, drinks, or use the facilities. As all buildings share an inward view and relationship to the central plaza, the architecture of District Wine Village is meant to encourage interaction and foster a sense of community.

District Wine Village is pedestrian-focused — through the central plaza, and surrounding landscape walk and winery patios. Visitor parking and back-of-house truck access is located outside the central public “rings” of the Village plan and provides a discrete access for winery production goods and equipment. The Village is planned to accommodate future building phases, filling the successively larger rings of the site. Outward, District Wine Village is surrounded by its test vineyards and shared wine production facility.

This new and collaborative approach to winemaking benefits both winemaker and visitor. For the winemakers, the resources of test vineyard and production facilities are consolidated and shared — lowering their threshold of entry and promoting the sharing of knowledge and resources. For visitors, the district offers a broader spectrum of tasting within a single location, as well as a social and events venue that is unique to anything in the region.