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The self-sustainable winery was conceived in 2006 and the intention was to create a building and its related utility systems that would operate independently from the energy and water grids and to eliminate hydrocarbon fuels from its operation, capture and sequester the carbon dioxide from its fermentations and create a zero carbon footprint facility. The winery was the highest scoring LEED building at any university when it was completed and the first LEED Platinum Winery in the USA. The adjacent Jess Jackson sustainable winery building is a highly passive research and utility space that will house the advanced energy and water systems that make this off-grid performance possible. Together these buildings will operate every daily in energy and water positive modes and at capacities, which exceed the demands even during the harvest season. The data system incorporated into these buildings for one hundred and fifty research fermentors, fourteen teaching fermentors will also monitor all energy, water and building activities in a secure, cloud-based software system that supports both web and handheld access, with the potential for bidirectional date and control functions. This data network has been extended to include real time monitoring of temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds in five production areas within two commercial winery sites and two creamery facilities, located more than 100 km from Davis. This now provides an example of a distributed dynamic network for the monitoring of the built environment in remote commercial food and wine facilities.

Since the Nineties of the previous century winery design has been undergoing deep changes. Some factors are affecting the main design criteria, focusing on a new conception where the winery becomes more and more open to customers, energy demand reduction is a crucial goal driven by economic and environmental reasons, and the whole systems is aimed at the research of a renovate quality of the product. The state of the art in this specific sector highlights how a reduction of the energy consumed by a winery can almost reduce to zero the carbon emissions of the whole wine-making process, as well as the existing lack of specific design criteria addressing the most recent above-mentioned trends and challenges, in particular for small and medium-sized farms, that on the whole account for a huge production in the Mediterranean area. The main aim of this work is to provide information about yearly thermal demand in the wine-making sector, by means of an integrated approach that considers the thermal loads required by room heating and air conditioning, must/juice pre-cooling, and fermentation cooling. Different models have been created and tested on a case study, in order to analyse the contribution of various farm design choices to the total energy demand. The most representative models are described and analysed in this work: they differ for harvesting modality, and materials and vertical distribution of the building envelope (aboveground vs underground). The results highlight the relevance of the three contributions in terms of total annual energy consumption, power peaks, and time distribution of energy demand over the year. The analysis of the data obtained by the different models have allowed to identify the strengths and potential critical issues, and to provide professionals, oenologists and farmers with useful elements to lend support in their decision making processes, as well as to define the next steps of the research, aimed at defining specific design criteria for small and medium-sized wineries.