Quinta do Portal Winery

The building is a warehouse for wine stage, a place to visit for the promotion of the Quinta do Portal Wine Cellar. It has two floors of warehouse being one buried with connection in tunnel to the existing production areas. The plant is rectangular with a width of approximately 20 meters and its structure, walls and slabs, is presented in interior in apparent concrete, with stereotomy studied. The large spaces of the warehouses end in a fabulous double staircase, also in apparent concrete, that makes the interconnection of all the spaces of the building. The slabs, given the heavy loads, rest on HEB beams spaced at 5 meters, which work together with the massive slab. There was also a need to create intermediate supports which, in this case, are very slender metallic elements composed of several welded thick plates.

As particularities of the building we used a “wall” of shale and boards of expanded cork agglomerate for the outer coating. The concrete used in the building had its composition studied with resources to previous samples being constituted by appreciable amounts of fines as is current in apparent concrete. The formwork with panels of special dimensions had to be studied and adapted on site for the proposed concreting steps.

The preparation of the work had to be very careful since most of the electrical and supply infrastructures are embedded in the concrete. For the implantation of some elements, such as nozzles for the air conditioning and humidification of the spaces, the openings were later realized with concrete cutting tools in order to guarantee the perfect finish of the concrete. As a matter of curiosity, the holes in the formwork anchors were sealed inside with the use of cork stoppers.

The “Portal” designed by Siza Vieira on the rooftop of the new building, is no more than an invitation for the discovery of the flavours and aromas of Quinta do Portal and to the wonderful kingdom of the Douro…

Quinta do Portal Cellars won the Douro Architecture Prize in 2011 and Best of Wine Tourism in Architecture and Landscapes category (Global Winner).