Wine Museum

Patrimonio is a village in the north of Corsica with about a thousand inhabitants that lies in the centre of the region producing some of the best wines on the island. Some years ago, the municipality decided to launch a programme to build a Wine Museum. The project was commissioned in 2009 to Gilles Perraudin, who had already designed some remarkable wine cellars in the south of France. At Patrimonio, Perraudin returned once again to the method of building walls from monolithic blocks of stone introduced in the Vauvert wine cellar in 1998. However, unlike the previous buildings, the particular topography, the peculiar climatic conditions and the relative complexity of the brief compelled the architect to develop the layout according to an articulated composition of built volumes and open spaces that give the complex the characteristics of a real actual "citadel".

The scheme in itself is a manifesto of pure "vernacular avant-garde": stone, low-tech architecture, built as much as possible with local materials — such as Bonifacio limestone and Corsican black pine — that not only return to basic and traditional technologies and compositional syntax but, like in ancient times, seem to have been just liberated from the dust that for centuries kept them hidden.

Beyond the architecture, other aspects of a strategic nature should be considered. The plan to create a city of wine, music and ampelography (a field of botany that studies and classifies varieties of grapevines) in a small town like Patrimonio is undoubtedly an ambitious one. However, in a situation where tourism of the area has ended up polarising every activity, weakening all the others by consequence, such an initiative represents an important and mandatory challenge, with a view to economic and territorial reequilibrium. And as would be expected, the road to fulfilment has not been easy.

After having obtained the necessary funding, major unexpected events brought about delays and pushed up costs. The most significant of these was the closure, halfway through the work, of the Bonifacio quarry in the south of Corsica, where the variegated limestone specified for the project came from: a setback that made it necessary to look for a similar stone, found in the end only in Provence.

The current state of affairs is that the opening of the complex, now finished — the management of which however looks like it will be organisationally and economically demanding — will be late. Will the Patrimonio Wine Museum, after having overcome all the obstacles succeed in creating a kind of "Bilbao effect" as was probably hoped for at the outset? This is a question that many are asking, even though the answer can only be affirmative.

Its architecture takes up and perfects the distinctive characteristics of Perraudin's latest brilliant works. It is majestic, presents singular criteria of essentiality and compositional coherence and — perhaps most importantly — it decisively sets itself at a distance from the absurd and often gratuitous showing-off that characterises many recent works. Instead, the work pursues, through a reduction of archaic matrix to basic components and principles, a profound identity with the place, reinforcing its essential traits and revealing an intensely Mediterranean spirit. Now, in a situation of incomplete completion, this work resembles a building inherited from a distant and mysterious past that is waiting to be brought to life with new activities. While functions change over time, forms and structures persist and this is a factor of considerable force that will give the Wine Museum the impetus to act as a formidable catalyst for the region and for tourism. Carlo Ezechieli