WINERY
Come visit the new winery at its completion! The targeted completion time is near the end of August. Sign up for mailings to receive news about the grand opening.
The winery is 8000 square feet under the cover of an arched roof. It features three levels—two different drop-offs from the crush pad allow for gravity loading of fermentors and the press. Another drop-off from the fermentation room to the press level allows us to load the press baskets by hand. This area will serve as a loading dock when we aren’t harvesting. The building’s west and north faces are buried in the hill which will stabilze the temperature during the year.
Laurence Ferar and Juergen Panoscha of Laurence Ferar and Associates designed the building. Laurence Ferar has also designed Pepper Bridge Winery, Leonetti Cellars, Woollaston Winery, Lemelson Vineyard, and Adelsheim Vineyards among many others. The firm’s experience enabled Illahe to construct a beautiful and practical facility. Our contractor is John Holdorf, also known as Popper, of Corvallis, Oregon. The carpenters are Hackenbruck Construction of Corvallis and electrical is being done by DC Electric of Rickreall.
FEATURES
Gravity-fed vinification : The multi-level facility will enable us to make our small batches in the most gentle way possible for the grapes. By moving wine carefully down the levels, we will be able to minimize fruit damage and take care in separating our lees and seeds from the fermentors. The levels will also enable us to use gravity while bottling our wines, eliminating pumping at this stage.
Solar power : Illahe currently generates more solar power than it uses, thanks to 3500 square feet of solar panels on the old winery facility. The panels face south and generate up to 50 kiloWatt hours per day. We also use the solar power of photosynthesis to mature our grapes.
Rainwater harvesting : Thanks to a moderate well on the site, Illahe has built a rainwater storage tank to feed our cleaning processes. The rainwater is collected from the roof, filtered, and pumped to hose stations in the building. The roof can collect about 75,000 gallons a year, but we will use only a fraction of this to clean processing equipment and barrels throughout the year.