Texas Tunnel Vision

A contemporary wine cave designed for storage and entertaining

- OWEN DUGAN

“Your beer drinking days are over,” said Bill Armstrong of Epoch Winery to Brian Korte, a principal of Clayton Korte architects in San Antonio and Austin. “You’re gonna start drinking wine.” Korte hadn’t set out to design buildings for winemakers and wine lovers: “Your career kind of takes a turn here and there, and you never really plan it out. It just kind of happens.” His first winery project began in 2005 but wasn’t completed until 11 years later. While his firm takes on a mix of residential and commercial work, Korte now finds wine architecture to be a major part of his job, with several wineries, most in Paso Robles, under his belt and a number of others in the works.

Chance often figures into Korte’s story. When an old contractor contact recalled that he’d designed wineries, Korte was brought on board to finish a Hill Country wine cave (shown above). The property belongs to wine lovers, who had started digging out a cave on a lark. “They had started tunneling this cave into the side of the hill, and then cut to a certain point and said, ‘Now what?’ You know, they’d always thought it would be really cool to dig a cave and store wine, so they just kind of started without any kind of idea of what they were doing,” he said.