Mexican winery

Paralelo winery in Baja's Valle de Guadalupe is architect Alejandro D’Acosta’s latest wine project.

Alejandro D'Acosta and Claudia Turrent have quietly been spreading their brand of sustainable design in northern Baja, Mexico, turning trash into interesting architecture. One of D'Acosta's recent experiments is La Escuelita, a wine school and olive oil factory in the Guadalupe Valley. One building is made of palos — discarded wood boards taken from construction sites, while the new wine tasting center’s walls are composed of wine barrel staves.

A vineyard in the Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico’s premier wine-growing region in Baja, near Ensenada.

D’Acosta stands next to wine barrels and rammed-earth walls imprinted with nopal cactus. “At one point the cactus actually started growing in the walls,” he says.

D’Acosta sits atop a wine barrel in the underground wine cave of his latest winery, Paralelo. The architect imprinted rammed-earth walls with things he found on the property: olive branches, nopal cactus and old tires. “This building is in touch with Pacha Mama — Mother Nature,” D’Acosta says.

To see more wonderful photos by Don Bartletti (coincidentally a former student of my father's) in the LA Times click here & here.