Joseph Phelps Vineyards in St. Helena is a Top Real Estate Project Award winner

The convergence of collaboration and ingenuity created a highly efficient, solar-enabled and future-ready winery production facility enabling Joseph Phelps Vineyard’s team in St. Helena to craft its wines.

This was accomplished by investing in state-of-the-art equipment and systems available beginning with construction of a new refrigerated barrel storage room.

The project began with construction of a 700-foot long soil nail wall cut into the earth to retain the hillside and make room for the new buildings. All excavated material was processed on site to create the building pad along with new access roads and parking lots.

A wine laboratory, offices, shop and truck dock were built on this site, along with a new crush pad with all new crush equipment.

Wright Contracting worked closely with the Joseph Phelps team to install the new crush line and an in-ground pomace augers, de-stemmers, optical sorters, basket and bladder presses and must chiller and transfer lines.

The architectural firm of vonRaesfeld and Associates utilized a design-build/design-assist approach throughout the project.

In addition to the buildings, new site infrastructure was installed, including the relocation of the winery’s process waste and wastewater systems without interruption to winery’s operations.

A second phase included retrofitting the existing barrel and tank room adding a substantial amount of storage capacity with new warm/cold glycol connections, tank controls, catwalks and other elements.

All work was completed on Sept. 30, 2020 on a tight schedule with close coordination among members of the Joseph Phelps team to ensure that everything was in place, commissioned and ready for harvest.