When a 2006 fire destroyed Silver Oak Winery’s vineyard in Oakville, Calif., its owners and staff members channeled their grief into rebuilding an environmentally responsible venue. After completing the rebuild, the project achieved LEED Platinum in 2016, the first production winery to do so. Capitalizing on the lessons learned during that Oakville reconstruction, Silver Oak’s owners had also begun planning a second high-performance winery, this time in Sonoma County's Alexander Valley. Opened to the public in 2018, Silver Oak’s 113-acre Alexander Valley winery announced today that it has been certified as a Living Building by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), making it the largest certified Living Building in the world. It is also the 25th project ever to achieve the ILFI’s rigorous standard, and the second winery to do so.
Designed by the San Francisco–based firm Piechota Architecture, the winery nestles into the rolling hills just east of Healdsburg, Calif. Drawing inspiration from the area’s favored barn style, the architects constructed a complex of tasting rooms, production facilities, and a wine center, each topped by a metal gable roof.
Like all projects that achieve Living Building status, Sliver Oak’s Alexander Valley winery underwent in a one-year audit to prove that the winery meets the ILFI’s net-zero waste, net-zero energy, and net-zero water requirements. Silver Oak's certification report notes that the facility sources its water from an on-site well and from treated wastewater. The winemaker treats wastewater resulting from its production of wine with an ultraviolet light system and a membrane bioreactor before reusing it for indoor plumbing, irrigation, and cleaning equipment. The winery achieves net-positive energy with 2,595 300-watt solar panels arrayed throughout the vineyard and an additional 404 panels on a nearby warehouse and shipping facility, generating 121% if the winery’s energy needs over the year’s audit.
To reduce the winery’s embodied carbon, the structures use concrete comprised of 40% fly ash, salvaged redwood siding—sourced from wine tanks used by the historical 1920s Cherokee Wine Association in Lodi, Calif.—for the building façade, and a lightweight steel frame, which decreased the on-site construction time.
In order to comply with the LBC’s Red List, which mandates that all building materials and products are free of the ILFI’s extensive list of harmful chemicals, Alexander Valley winery’s design team spent three-and-a-half years to vet each component, researching more than 3,000 products and materials before selecting 1,600 different products in the final project.
“We saw this as an opportunity to shift the paradigm in how we think about our most enduring artifacts as an industry: vineyards, wineries, and tasting rooms,” said Silver Oak sustainability manager Haley Duncan in a press release. “Symbolically, the winery is built to engender community relationships and also set a broader, global benchmark here in Sonoma County.”
