Something about Vega Sicilia

The driveway to Vega Sicilia is flanked by its splendid Japanese garden, where the visitor is welcomed by the wealth of bamboo, sequoias or maples. The elegant main façade in facing brick, with the main feature being the entrance of what was the chapel of the group of buildings that made up the estate, is on the other side of the drive.

As you come out of the back of the building, you enter the entrails of the winery, a series of buildings that house the different production zones.

You first come to the winemaking facility, with its stainless steel tanks, in perfect rows, where the Valbuena 5º (which is aged for 5 years) is produced. The second floor is home to the laboratory and control room, where computer calculations are used to control all the processes involved in making the wines.

In the same building, but separated by huge sliding doors, there is a type of semi-circular frontispiece with 19 oak tanks where the wines that will have Único – made only in exceptional years and aged for a minimum of 10 years – are fermented.

As you leave the winemaking facility, you come to the cooperage building, where under the supervision of the master cooper, and using state-of-the-art machinery, the American oak barrels are made that Vega Sicilia uses to age its wines. There is a series of warehouses adjoining the cooperage building and where the ancillary items – plant health products, packaging, auxiliary machinery, etc – are stored. This all creates a uniform architectural complex where the main emphasis is on tidiness and cleanliness.

You then come to the bottling facility, a climate-controlled building with the ideal humidity and temperature for the wine to be in the bottle. The wines are left to rest here after they have been aged in barrels until they are released on the market.

Finally, the ageing rooms are on the ground floor of the main building. Over 3,000 barrels are left to peacefully rest inside warehouses designed to ensure calm and perfect harmony: floors made out of red clay mosaic that spreads up the side walls of the building until it merges with a corrugated ceiling made out of wood slats, perfectly fitted together, which recall the inside of a huge barrel; the climate control elements, along with the auxiliary tanks used for decanting, are hidden behind sliding doors similar to the roofs located at the roof beds of the warehouses, with the same barrel-like appearance; the lighting ranges from a warm golden ambient tone to the intense cold light projected from the foot of the granite columns holding up the roof beams, which is needed to carry out the warehouse tasks.

These buildings are surrounded by vineyards and, at the end of the estate, where it borders on the River Duero, by plantations of oaks, cork and walnut trees that in future will provide the raw material for the corks and barrels that the coming generations will produce.

Discretely set apart, the neoclassical mansion stands in the middle of the gardens that are overlooked by the main façade of the winery. It was the former residence of the owners of the estate and is now used to welcome VIPs, host lunches and other formal occasions.