House of Climats and Burgundy Wines
The Cité des Vins et des Climats de Bourgogne is a unique and innovative place based on the sensory experience of visitors. The tour begins in semi-darkness, facing superimposed multimedia screens composed like geological strata. The cold light of the screens bathes the room.
Discreet, intensive points of light create luminous landmarks around the screens, guiding visitors. The visit continues, guided by the strata that follow the movements of the scenography. Warm light reveals the poetics of the layers, their differences in color, thickness and material. LED lighting lines emphasize the play of superimposed folds and hollows formed by the strata. Artificial lighting is integrated into architectural elements such as walls and display cases.
The exhibits play a major role in the lighting scenography, drawing the eyes in. The atmosphere is intimate, welcoming and vibrant. The visit ends with the Aroma Cellar, the sensory heart of the exhibition. The space’s lighting atmosphere is tinted with all the colors of wine through the projection of images on the walls.
The display cases housing the wine glasses are lit by a bright, directed light. This lighting accentuates the preciousness of the nectar, and invades the space thanks to a play of light reflections on the liquids, precious and animated by visitors.
Burgundy owes its terroir to the richness of its climates, its soil, its winegrowers and their know-how. For this reason, the exhibition is composed of a “conceptual” sky and ground, and mediation tools to present these three components. The “ground” is developed by a set of strata that slide along the walls of the exhibition, illuminated by lines of light incorporated into the strata and spotlights that stage the white walls and simply create shadows of the layers with each other.
The “climate” is highlighted by a large luminous chandelier that comes to life with sequences of skies: thunderstorms, passing clouds, blue skies and grey skies top the Macon exhibition. This large chandelier is made up of a huge number of polycarbonate tubes of varying lengths, each equipped with RGBW sources. Each tube is a pixel in a matrix program controlled by DMX using small, low-resolution video sequences. This “sky” tints the general lighting of the exhibition with a cold light, in which the objects on display are contrasted by a warm, directed light.
A synthetic model presents the geology, the soil and the successive layers that make up the alchemy of the Burgundy region. This is a video-projection on a white model. This educational display is located in the main space. The chandelier is dimmed above the model, to give the projection sufficient contrast.
The same applies above the aroma table, where the chandelier is tempered: a projector slid between the tubes creates a veil of complementary 3000K light over the table, while in each of the glass globes, the aroma artifacts are illuminated by a sheet of 4000K custom made light panels by Vivalyte.
