Hundertwasser and Quixote Winery

Main door entrance to winery

See more photos in the Flickr photoset

Tucked away at the end of a long private road at the base of the jagged edges of Stags’ Leap cliffs in Napa Valley is the first, last, and only building in North America designed by Austrian artist Frederick Hundertwasser, the Quixote Winery. As a participant of the Taste3 conference, I recently had the privilege of touring this architectural delight. Here are a few highlights.

Hundertwasser was a singularly unusual man. An environmentalist, a nudist (he gave a press conference in the nude on at least one occasion), a ladies man (he died in his 70s on the QE2 on route back from Asia with his 20-something Japanese girlfriend), Hundertwasser was a wildly distinctive artist (think of mash-up of Klimt and Gaudi), whose works spanned from prints to public housing to postage stamps.

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