Greystone and the Culinary Institute of America
Near St. Helena, California
This immense stone fortress is Greystone, now the western campus of the Culinary Institute of America, and once the largest stone winery in the world. It was built in eighteen eighty nine for a wealthy young mining heir named William Bowers Bourn the Second, who intended it as a cooperative cellar where the many small grape growers of the upper valley could crush and store their wine together. The architect Hamden McIntyre designed it as a gravity flow winery, so grapes entered at the top and the juice moved downward through each stage of production by gravity alone.
The building measures more than one hundred thousand square feet, its walls cut from local stone. After decades of changing hands, it became famous under the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order that owned it from nineteen forty five to nineteen eighty nine and made sparkling wine here. In nineteen ninety three the Culinary Institute of America bought the property and spent millions on a seismic retrofit and renovation, reopening it in nineteen ninety five as a professional cooking school.
Today the halls where wine once aged are full of student chefs. Greystone was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy eight.
