Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/80303
MANA GEMENT Arizona to Build a Teaching Winery Yavapai College to repurpose racquetball court as sustainable cellar By Joe Chauncey The roof at the Southwest Wine Center will be approximately three times the size of the building's footprint, providing shade and rainwater collection. F riends are constantly asking me what projects we are designing at Boxwood because they know that the answer will likely come with a story or two. My answer during the past year has often started with, "We are repurposing an un- derutilized outdoor racquetball building into a wine-education center for a college in Arizona, and we are designing it to be net-zero for water and electricity." That statement is loaded with opportunity for a variety of responses from quizzi- cal to "racquetball?" and "wow!" and inevitably, "Do they actually make wine in Arizona?" Then I respond, "Have you heard of the rock band Tool?" But more on that later. Yes, they do make wine in Arizona, and they are taking it very seriously. As we have seen in region after region, AVA after AVA, state after state across the country as the wine industry embeds itself into a geographic area, it reaches a point when it can no longer on-the-job train the number of people necessary to keep it vibrant and growing. What follows this trend, because of necessity, is formal viticulture and enology education and training that technical schools, colleges and universities can offer. This has happened in California, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Missouri and Illinois— and it is happening in Arizona. 52 WINES & VINES SEPTEMBER 2012 CENTRAL NV ARIZONA Flagstaff CA Southwest Wine Center at Yavapai College Clarkdale Phoenix Tucson MX NM UT CO The Verde Valley in Arizona has embraced the wine industry, and Yavapai College is responding to the need for qualified viticulture and enology professionals by creating the Southwest Wine Center on its Clarkdale campus and planning to make it the premier academic center supporting the wine industry in the desert Southwest. The center offers formal coursework in viticulture, has planted the first three acres of its 7-acre estate vineyard and this fall will add the first enology classes. Next year it will have a sustainable teaching winery and expand the knowledge repository. Sustainable teaching winery The teaching winery will be housed in a repurposed structure formerly used for racquetball. The winery will contain four main spaces, one in each former court: a fermentation room, two barrel-aging rooms and a tasting room where students will gain real-world experience in mar- keting and selling Yavapai College wine. The 12-inch-thick masonry and cement plaster "bones" of the building are ideally suited for a winery because their mass will help moderate temperatures while the smooth cement plaster surface is easy to keep clean. Eight inches of polyiso- cyanurate insulation and stucco will be added to the exterior surfaces to reduce heat transfer to the interior while allow- ing the mass of the walls to remain cool. Insulated translucent panels (Kalwall + Lumira aerogel) will be placed in the up- per walls to provide daylighting to each of the four spaces. These clerestories will allow faculty and students to teach and learn enology in the building without the need for artificial lighting, saving approx- imately 60% of the electricity usually dedicated to lighting. End walls of each court will be filled in with large operable doors to promote views to the outside and create easy passage for visitors, winery workers and equipment. Concrete slabs will be removed and replaced with floors that slope to basket drains. Work