The Carneros wine area, which straddles Sonoma and Napa counties with its rolling, vine-textured hills and funky breezes meandering in from San Pablo Bay, boasts a few of California’s finest wineries. However just one welcomes you on the prime of its driveway with the serene, spectral presence of a 20-foot-tall alabaster head of a younger woman, “Sanna,” crafted by famed Spanish artist Jaume Plensa.
The Donum Property, whose grounds showcase greater than 60 monumental sculptures by the likes of Plensa, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring, Doug Aitken, Robert Indian and Anselm Kiefer, to call a couple of, accommodates what’s considered the biggest personal sculpture assortment of any vineyard on the earth. Some are boldly seen. Others are hidden in groves of timber or camouflaged inside thick grasses. All of them may be visited by merely making a reservation.
“Persons are at all times like, ‘Why haven’t I heard of this earlier than?’” stated tour information Alexandra Reif as she walked me and a buddy alongside a slender pathway close to the vineyard’s entry.
Donum — Latin for “reward” — didn’t start as an artwork nirvana. First a dairy farm after which a part of the historic Buena Vista Vineyard, the property was acquired by Danish entrepreneur Allan Warburg and three companions in 2008. By 2011, Warburg and his spouse, Chinese language-born artwork collector Mei Warburg, assumed full management of the location and started what would develop into an formidable experiment/ardour mission.
Mei and Allen Warburg are the house owners and the visionaries behind the Donum Property.
(Alexander Rubin Images)
The couple, whose main residence is in Hong Kong, declined to be interviewed, however they at all times needed artwork at Donum. The group’s Chief Govt Angelica de Vere Mabray notes that the concept of reworking the property — which makes a speciality of single-vineyard Pinot Noir and Chardonnay — took form slowly. “Artwork was added intuitively, based mostly on the place it felt proper within the panorama. Over time, that spontaneity developed into one thing extra intentional,” she says.
The primary piece the Warburgs put in — Zhan Wang’s “Synthetic Rock No. 126” — is a tall, stainless-steel duplicate of a craggy scholar’s rock from China, reflecting Mei’s early curiosity in modern Chinese language artwork. From there they added one or two items a yr from around the globe, that price rushing up dramatically as their curiosity grew, and the imaginative and prescient turned clearer. Since De Vere Mabray’s arrival in 2019, the property has added greater than 30 works and refined its artwork program to focus more and more on site-specific commissions.
Practically three dozen artists have designed works that reply on to the property’s circumstances. Accomplished in 2022, Olafur Eliasson’s Vertical Panorama Pavilion (created with architect Sebastian Behmann — their design agency is named Studio Different Areas) is a round construction topped with a conical glass cover composed of 832 vividly coloured panels, every reflecting a unique environmental attribute of the area—soil circumstances, daylight, temperature, wind, humidity and the vegetative palette of the encompassing panorama. Close by, Yang Bao’s “Hyperspace,” a gold, mirrored pyramid accompanied by gleaming shards, nestled in a former lavender area, shimmers amid thyme, gingko, California poppies and native grasses, accompanied by haunting, and always mutating, music.
Yang Bao’s “Hyperspace.”
(The Donum Property)
“The artists stroll the property and select their location based mostly on how they need the piece to dwell within the land,” says De Vere Mabray.
In all probability the preferred (and most Instagrammed) piece on the property is Richard Hudson’s “Love Me,” a heart-shaped, oversize sculpture clad in exaggeratedly curved mirrored metal set atop a faraway hill. The property’s most up-to-date addition (put in this yr), accessed by way of a winding path traversing thick grasses, is Sanford Biggers’ “Oracle” (2021), which fuses African and European masks, busts and figures. Aitken’s “Sonic Mountain (Sonoma)” is embedded in a deep Eucalyptus grove on the far finish of the property. It consists of 365 stainless-steel chimes, suspended from a round cover, every tuned to catch the wind and produce a delicate concord.
Richard Hudson’s “Love Me.”
(Robert Berg / The Donum Property)
Native panorama structure agency Arterra, which got here on in 2022 for “Hyperspace,” continues to work with artists, the house owners, and Donum’s winery workforce to form the expertise, following the lead of the prevailing panorama.
“It’s about letting the artwork breathe and really feel prefer it’s at all times belonged right here,” says Gretchen Whittier, a companion at Arterra.
That shifting setting creates typically stunning variations in sensation and perspective, enabled by numerous vegetation, hills, a protracted pond, deep groves and, in fact, thick rows of vines. “There’s a second whenever you flip a nook and immediately there’s this monumental work,” says De Vere Mabray.
Visits are by appointment solely, and experiences are personalised. For $250, company can traverse the 200-acre property on a guided all-terrain car, adopted by wines and small plates. For $100, they’ll get pleasure from a wine tasting and guided artwork tour on foot. (With canapés, it’s $150.) A self-guided artwork tour priced at $50 lets you expertise the gathering with no wine tasting. Donum’s handout literature and web site present labeled maps and thorough descriptions of every paintings.
Angelica de Vere Mabray is the chief govt of the Donum Property, situated within the Carneros wine area nestled between Napa and Sonoma counties.
(Greg Gorman Images)
Donum, says De Vere Mabray, tries its finest to keep away from the preciousness and insider vibe of many museums and artwork parks. Since it is a hospitality house first, she notes, “you’re not being instructed how lengthy to look or tips on how to really feel.”
“The artwork is critical, however it’s additionally approachable. You possibly can stroll proper as much as it, contact it, sit beneath it. It’s a part of the land,” says Whittier.
The property’s minimalist welcome house and tasting rooms, a fancy generally known as the Donum Residence (in addition to the manufacturing facility, housed on the footprint of the property’s former dairy barn), recede into the panorama, taking up the easy, abstracted shapes of agricultural buildings. Each had been designed by Bay Space architect Matt Hollis.
Regardless of its tens of millions of {dollars}’ value of artwork, Donum is basically a working winery and farm. Half of its 200 acres are planted for grapes and the remainder are devoted to gardens, orchards and farmland (Donum maintains further vineyards in Russian River, Anderson Valley and the Sonoma Coast). Donkeys, together with a pair, Clyde and Opal, patrol the vineyards to fend off coyotes, whereas chickens and sheep rotate by means of the rows, and hawks and owls are nurtured to discourage rodents. Donum is without doubt one of the few wineries in California to be regenerative natural licensed — which implies its staff pay shut consideration to soil well being and having all kinds of wholesome vegetation and animals.
Sculptor Jaume Plensa’s “Sanna,” 2015.
(The Donum Property)
The Warburgs proceed to pick out each piece, says De Vere Mabray, based mostly totally on intuition. The method makes the gathering really feel a bit inconsistent — significantly the items that aren’t site-specific — but additionally private and quirkily stunning.
Donum shouldn’t be the one vineyard within the area to incorporate modern artwork. In Napa, Hess Persson Estates shows works by a number of blue-chip artists in its gallery. Corridor Wines in St. Helena curates artwork installations close to its architect-designed tasting areas. Santa Rosa’s Paradise Ridge Vineyard options sculptural works in its gardens. And St. Helena’s Louis M. Martini commissions modern works impressed by winemaking in its tasting room.
However these locations kind of deal with their artworks as accents to the wine-tasting expertise. At Donum, the wine, artwork and panorama really feel calibrated collectively; they exist on extra equal footing.
“Our mission is to weave artwork harmoniously all through the panorama,” summed up the Warburgs, in an e-mail.
Provides Reif, our tour information: “Out right here, it’s simply you, the vines, the sky and the artwork. Nothing’s between you and the sensation.”
