California’s Donum Estate
Located in the cool Carneros wine region north of San Francisco, Donum produces award-winning Pinot Noir on some 80 hectares of vine trellises amid a monumental collection of modern sculpture. FLORENCE TSAI talks to its owner, ALLAN WARBURG
Having inherited a long-held passion for wine from his father, Allan Warburg bought the Donum Estate in 2011 after his brother, who’d been exporting its wines to Denmark, told him the property was up for sale. Established in 2001, the 80-hectare vineyard sits amid a pastoral landscape interspersed with 150-year-old olive trees, beehives and an organic farm.
It was founded as an “ultimate Pinot Noir project” based on the Burgundian Grand-Cru model, aimed at making top-flight Pinot
Noir and Chardonnay. It also creates Pinot Noir wines from grapes from its vineyards in Northern California’s Russian River and Anderson Valley. Donum (Latin for “gift of the land”) is celebrating its 20th vintage this year, making single-vineyard, single-appellation Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from small lots that distinctly express the characteristics of each terroir.
What’s also special about Donum, however, is an impressive art collection that’s exhibited beautifully throughout the estate. Since 2014, Donum has presented monumental artworks as part of its terrain, with a large steel rock sculpture by Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Wang being the first.
Asked why he decided to incorporate art into the estate, Warburg, who now lives in Hong Kong, says that it “felt like a natural merging of passions: it started with getting to know the artists, which naturally led to owning their works and building a collection”. His love of art began when he met his wife Mei in Beijing. They lived in an artists’ community for nearly three decades, which is when they “started to build relationships and [their] collecting really started to take shape”. While it may seem unusual to place the bulk of their collection on a wine estate, Warburg insists that it makes complete sense.
“A wine estate is special, a place not only to produce wine, but also a landscape with its own personality and terroir,” he says. “The works are placed in the landscape to complement and enrich the experience and the estate. We don’t want to be seen as just a sculpture park within a wine estate; it’s more about putting great things together and watching them grow and interweave with one another.”
Currently, the estate has 40 major artworks by artists from around the world, including contemporary heavyweights such as Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Keith Haring, Yue Minjun and Tracy Emin. Unveiled officially in 2018, the sculptures are placed strategically around the landscape, allowing visitors to encounter them in the open air as they explore the vineyards while enjoying views of the Sonoma mountains and San Francisco Bay.
When it comes to the wine, Warburg says “we leave the production to our fantastic team – our CEO, Angelica de Vere Mabray, and winemaker Dan Fishman”. Under recent lockdown guidelines, wine production on the estate continued with the creation of a special limited edition of its 2016 Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine, made entirely from estate-grown Chardonnay grapes. When asked what he feels is the most important quality in wine and wine production, Warburg says “like many products, it’s important to take time to consider the details and focus on refinement and have appreciation and respect of the medium – in our case, the grapes”.
This approach of careful contemplation is also reflected in the Warburgs’ collecting style. For many works, they’ve worked directly with the artist. “This collaboration between the artist and us, the collector, is important,” Warburg says. “Before commissioning anything, we spend time together at Donum, drinking the wine and walking the land, and then we arrive at an idea with a specific location in mind for an artwork. When you bring each of these elements together something special happens – not always does one plus one equals two.”
Given that they’ve travelled the world and experienced art of diverse origins and practices, the estate currently exhibits artists from 18 different nations, from Colombia to Cameroon to Japan. From a majestic Kusama pumpkin to a large heart-shaped sculpture made of stainless steel by Richard Hudson to a rustic aeroplane bursting with flowers by Anselm Kiefer, the estate’s sculpture collection is nothing short of breathtaking.
Most recently, Donum unveiled a new artwork by Doug Aitken titled Sonic Mountain (Sonoma). Mimicking a wind chime, the installation responds to changes in the surrounding environment and creates patterns of sound as wind moves through it. An interactive artwork, it explores the fluidity of time by creating a continuously evolving experience that’s activated by the surrounding landscape. One particularly outstanding piece, and also one of Warburg’s favourites, is Subodh Gupta’s gigantic sculpture of a wine bottle, made entirely from stainless-steel containers of various shapes and sizes.
The infusion of wine and art can even be seen on Donum’s bottle labels. For instance, each Pinot Noir bottle of different years is printed with one of Ai Weiwei’s signature animal heads, which he designed especially for the Warburgs, reflecting the Circle of Animals/Zodiac
Heads sculptures that he created for the estate in 2011. To celebrate the significant collection of artworks on the estate, a 368-page hardback limited-edition book, Donum – Gift of The Land, was published in 2019 detailing the collection, which can be found at the Upper House hotel in Hong Kong. Noted American wine writer and contributor to the book, James Laube, has said that “Donum is a place that could only exist in our times. It serves as a modern-day blueprint for what it takes to make a great wine. It entails vision, terroir, ambition, passion, perseverance and good fortune. Wine lovers are witnesses to these rare phenomena, and also the beneficiaries. Donum captures these elements in its own unique way.”
Currently, Donum is a private estate that’s open for wine tastings by appointment only, due to the small staff and an ethos of providing a personal experience for each visitor. The wines, however, can be ordered from Donum and shipped globally. Since last autumn, the estate has hosted a programme of quarterly public art events involving the artists represented in the collection and Warburg says he’s keen to become more involved with the art fairs, events and happenings in the greater Bay Area.