Clos Pegase: Michael Graves and the Temple to Wine

Napa Valley has no shortage of architecture that performs for its audience, but Clos Pegase is the one that arrived by competition. In 1984, the founders Jan Shrem, a publisher and art collector, and his wife Mitsuko Shrem organised a design competition with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their new winery in Calistoga, at the northern end of the valley. Ninety-six design teams entered. The winner was Michael Graves.

The building stages wine as a classical subject, and stages the drinker as its audience.

The commission is worth pausing on. Architectural competitions of this seriousness are rare for private wineries; to run one through a major museum, and to draw nearly a hundred teams, signalled an ambition beyond a production facility. It was a provocation as much as a commission: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did not lend its name to a branding exercise but administered a genuine competition, and ninety-six teams responded with genuine proposals. For a private winery to submit its architecture to that kind of judgement, in 1984, was unusual in any country. In Napa Valley, where winery architecture has often meant a style applied to a shed, it said the building would be argued for, not just built. The brief called for tasting rooms, winemaking areas, bottle storage, and a private villa for the owner. The winery's published project size is sixteen thousand four hundred square feet. The firm's own project page names Hildegard Richardson as associate architect and Edward Schmidt as the credited artist.

The name comes from one of Shrem's favourite paintings, a Pegasus by the French symbolist Odilon Redon. The winery was founded in the early 1980s; the current owner's brand deck dates the founding to 1983 and states that the winery opened in 1987, though some sources give 1984. The founders’ profile matters here. Jan Shrem was a publisher and art collector, not a career vintner; the winery was founded as a cultural project as much as an agricultural one. The name, taken from Shrem’s Odilon Redon Pegasus, announced the programme. This was to be a place where art and wine shared the same roof, and the brief’s inclusion of a private villa for the owner, alongside tasting rooms, winemaking areas, and bottle storage, made the estate a small domain rather than a factory. Graves's design was completed and the winery opened in 1987.

A competition, not a commission

Ninety-six teams is a number worth sitting with. A private winery, not a museum and not a city, drew nearly a hundred serious proposals, and it did so through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which administered the competition as a genuine selection and not a ceremony. The founders were not shopping for a style. They were staging an argument about what a winery could be, and they invited the profession to make its case.

The museum's involvement is the other half of the story. An institution does not lend its name to a private selection process unless the project meets its own test of cultural seriousness, and the result was that the winner arrived with a mandate no ordinary commission confers. Graves's design had been judged in public, by the standards of architecture rather than the standards of marketing. Everything that followed, the temple, the art, the restoration four decades later, flows from that first decision to hold a competition.

A Bacchanalian temple

Graves's design is a postmodern composition that blends classical, contemporary, and Mediterranean references; the owner's brand deck describes it in exactly those terms. A contemporary account called it a romantic vision of a Bacchanalian temple, with pastel colours, a symmetrical plan, and monumental forms, evoking Tuscan vistas and the landscapes of Poussin and Lorrain. It is worth reading that description carefully. The reference points are not other wineries but painting: the building stages wine as a classical subject, and stages the drinker as its audience.

Graves was the right architect for this programme and the wrong one for Napa orthodoxy, which is the same thing. His postmodernism, classical and contemporary and Mediterranean at once, refused the valley’s vernacular reflexes. The pastel colours, the symmetrical plan, the monumental forms: these are the instruments of a civic architecture applied to a rural site, and the Tuscan vistas and the landscapes of Poussin and Lorrain invoked by contemporary accounts are the correct references. The building does not imitate a farmhouse. It stages an idea of civilisation, with wine at its centre.

The estate includes a sculpture park and murals, and a planned circular mountain of Pegasus amphitheatre was never realised. Later phases added some twenty thousand square feet of excavated caves, including a Cave Theatre used for tastings, alongside a rotating art gallery and a cypress-lined lawn that looks out over the vines. Published figures for the estate vineyards vary: the estate sits on four parcels, with totals reported from about four hundred fifty to five hundred two acres depending on the source.

The unbuilt is part of the story too. A planned circular mountain of Pegasus amphitheatre was never realised, which is worth noting because it shows the scale of the original ambition: not a winery with art attached, but a cultural complex with wine at its heart. What was built, the sculpture park, the murals, the caves, the Cave Theatre, the rotating gallery, the cypress-lined lawn with its vineyard views, carries that ambition forward in stages.

The winemaking legacy began with Andre Tchelistcheff, who made the inaugural vintages, a seriousness of intent that matched the architecture.

Tchelistcheff’s presence at the beginning is not decorative. The inaugural vintages were made by a winemaker of genuine stature, which meant the temple had something in its cellars worthy of the architecture. The programme held: art on the walls, sculpture in the grounds, serious wine in the bottle.

The temple, the cave, the grounds

Read the building as Graves intended and it is a civic composition set down in a valley: symmetrical, monumental, pastel, drawing on classical and Mediterranean vocabularies rather than the local vernacular. The tasting rooms, the winemaking areas, the bottle storage, the owner's private villa: arranged not as a production plant but as a small domain, with the gravity of an institution. Napa orthodoxy would have offered a barn. Graves offered a temple to wine, and meant it.

The logic continues underground. The twenty-thousand-square-foot cave system, with its Cave Theatre for tastings, is the sanctum to the building's temple: the cellar as a ceremonial space, not a warehouse. Above ground the murals carry the programme onto the walls and the sculpture park carries it across the grounds, so that the estate reads as a single cultural project with wine at its centre. The planned circular mountain of Pegasus amphitheatre was never realised, but its absence is instructive. It shows the scale of the original ambition: a cultural complex with a winery in it, rather than a winery with art attached.

None of this is decoration. The murals, the sculpture park, the gallery, the Cave Theatre: each is an instrument of the same argument, that wine deserves the architecture of civilisation. The brief called for a villa alongside the tanks and the barrels, and the estate has behaved like a domain ever since. Four decades on, the composition still reads as a single thought.

Sales, bankruptcy, restoration

In 2013 the Shrems sold the winery to Vintage Wine Estates; the sale completed in August of that year, and the Shrems' personal art collection, including works by Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, and Richard Serra, was not included. In 2024, after Vintage Wine Estates entered bankruptcy, Adair Family Wines acquired Clos Pegase and four other wineries for eighty-five million dollars. In 2026 Adair Family Wines undertook a restoration of the winery and announced a grand opening for the restored property on 27 June.

The building carries no formal heritage designation and no UNESCO listing; its significance is critical rather than statutory, a high-water mark of postmodern winery architecture. What the 2026 restoration preserves is not just Graves's composition but an idea: that a working winery could be commissioned like a cultural institution, judged like one, and built to outlast its first owners. The competition drew ninety-six teams. The temple got built.

The 2026 restoration

The bankruptcy of Vintage Wine Estates in 2024 could have been the end of the story. Instead Adair Family Wines acquired Clos Pegase together with four other wineries for eighty-five million dollars, and in 2026 undertook a restoration of the estate ahead of a grand opening on 27 June. The restored property returns to public life with its programme intact: twenty thousand square feet of wine caves, a Cave Theatre tasting experience, a rotating art gallery, and wine cellar tastings.

Postmodern buildings of the 1980s are now of restoration age, and most are being restored as curiosities. Clos Pegase is being restored as a working proposition. The wager made in 1984, that a winery commissioned like a cultural institution would outlast its first owners and their balance sheets, is being settled in the most practical way available: a new owner spending real money on someone else's temple.

There is a lesson in the ownership arc. The 2013 sale to Vintage Wine Estates, the Shrems’ art collection pointedly not included, the 2024 bankruptcy and the eighty-five-million-dollar acquisition by Adair Family Wines of Clos Pegase and four other wineries: this is the ordinary turbulence of the wine business. That the building survived it intact, and that the 2026 restoration prepared it for a new public life, suggests the competition’s wager was sound. Architecture commissioned as culture tends to outlast the balance sheets.