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WINEMAKING TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT 38 WINES&VINES May 2015 went into the building and went upstairs," he says. "I remember the third floor and walking around kind of gingerly—I didn't go up there much because it didn't feel very secure—and him saying we're going to bring winemaking back, and we're going to bring life back with the history. He said: 'It's really not that bad. You should have seen some of the chateaux and properties we've restored in France.'" The original Buena Vista estate, which once sprawled across several hundred acres, is now situated on a 9-acre parcel near the city of Sonoma. The property is a sliver of land that runs along a creek. Alongside the creek is a road that stretches from a gate to the winery and tasting room at the back of the property. All winemaking operations including the barrel cave, private lounge and a museum of winemaking equipment are housed in the three-storey Champagne Cellars building, or the larger of the two stone buildings. The smaller stone structure, known as the Press House, contains the tasting room. The goal of the renovation, which began in 2012, was to make the winery appear as it did in the 1850s. Cello & Maudru and Site- works were the general contractors who worked with historic property specialist Ar- chitectural Resources Group, MKM & Associ- ates engineers and RDC Construction. The first job entailed removing a thick covering of ivy that sprawled across almost the entire façade of the Champagne Cellars. When the ivy had been removed, Blackwood said work- ers erected scaffolding around the entire building so they could inspect and restore the original stone walls. Workers dug out 4 to 6 inches of the original grout and then brought in a specialist to match a new grout with the stones. The building's decrepit roof was torn off, and with the top of the structure's walls exposed, it allowed an- other set of workers to employ the relatively novel renovation process called "center-core drilling." The process involved a series of long holes about 4 to 6 inches in diameter drilled from the top of the building's walls to about a foot below ground. After workers drilled through the stone walls they inserted a long steel rod into each. To provide even more support, the rods are also linked to eyelets set in the thick timber beams on the interior of the structure. Once all the rods were in place, Blackwood said workers filled the holes with epoxy cement. Blackwood notes that the nearby Press House was restored under previous ownership with a very common method of installing metal plates to the exterior of the stones. While effective, the process does mar the appearance of a structure. "There's a skeleton structure within the walls holding everything together," he said of the cen- ter core drilling method. "You maintain that original beauty, that original look and feel." A working historic winery Inside the Champagne Cellars, new wooden fermentation tanks are set beneath huge, thick beams of redwood, many of which are original, old-growth timber used when the winery was originally built. The 45-hectoliter tanks were custom designed by François Foudrier and feature stainless steel lids that can be removed for fermentation or closed to serve as storage or blending vessels. Brian Maloney, a native of Sonoma, is the director of winemaking for the Boisset wineries Exterior metal plates serve as evidence of the Press House retrofit.