ENTTEC News · Architectural lighting
The curious business of lighting a bottle of rosé
At Clos du Temple in southern France, Jean-Denis Rolland and his team put 987 ENTTEC pixels behind the wine and a small night sky above it.
The view down the grotto, with glowing bottle bases at eye level and three constellations overhead.
Photo · Antonio Buonsante
Cabrières, France
When our colleague Antoine sent us the first photos, I spent a while trying to work out what I was looking at. There was a passage with gold rippling down either side and a little night sky overhead. Then I looked more closely at the walls. Those were the bottoms of wine bottles. An awful lot of them.
The photos were taken at Gérard Bertrand’s Clos du Temple Vinothèque in Cabrières, in the Languedoc region of southern France. Architects Antonio Buonsante and Delphine Roque had designed a tasting room in the form of a grotto, with vintages of Clos du Temple rosé set into folded metal walls and three constellations overhead. I wanted to know how they’d got the bottles to do that, so I asked Jean-Denis Rolland, co-founder of Stage2Home.
Turn the bottle around
On a shelf, you’d usually look for the label. Here it’s the little hollow in the base that’s worth a look. Put a light behind it and the glass catches the glow like a lump of amber. Stand back and all those little hollows make a band of gold that follows every fold in the wall.
So where do you put the lights?
“We had already worked with ENTTEC products, and for the project described here, using Smart PXL dots made perfect sense. So we asked them to create a second layer to support the bottles in order to integrate the Smart PXL dots. This allowed us to illuminate the wall through the bottles without the light sources being visible.”
Jean-Denis and his team proposed a model of the effect and the client gave them the go-ahead. With the dots tucked into that extra layer of the rack, all you see from the passage is the light coming through the glass.
Photo · Antonio Buonsante
One slightly unusual thing to check
A photograph catches the walls holding still. Jean-Denis’s team made custom media files and ran them from a media server so the light could wander across the rows. The bottles stay put, of course. It’s the light that makes the wall look as though it’s shifting.
Then there was the matter of what was in the bottles. Jean-Denis says the one unusual technical check was whether the wavelengths of the LEDs could cause the wine to age prematurely. Fair enough. There’s also a dedicated white channel in those RGBW dots, so if a few reds or whites ever move in, the team can change the lighting to suit.
A few more views of Clos du Temple, from the bottle-lined passage to the wines on the table.
Inside the installation
987 pixels behind the glass
Here’s what was hiding back there. ENTTEC’s Antoine McGowan worked with Jean-Denis’s team on the LED system, including how to get power and data to all those dots. Two Pixelator Mini Mk2 controllers distribute the cues from the media server. The PLink Injectors translate them into a signal the dots understand.
How did it all go once the kit was on site?
“We worked with Antoine, who provided excellent advice and helped us build a solid technical infrastructure that allowed us to address all potential issues early on,” says Rolland. “The deployment went very smoothly, with no problems encountered.”
My favourite photo is the one at the tasting table. After all those rows of bottles with their bottoms facing you, there’s one standing the right way up, next to an empty glass. By that point I’d spent so long looking at the bottles as lights that I’d almost forgotten what you’re there for.
Photo · Antonio Buonsante
Project credits
Client
Gérard Bertrand
Architecture
Antonio Buonsante, Studio Buonsante, and Delphine Roque, Roque Architectes
Lighting and automation
Jean-Denis Rolland and the Stage2Home team
Integration
Grégory Mayol, Stage2Home
LED system and hardware
Antoine McGowan, ENTTEC
Writer
Damon Nash, ENTTEC
Photography
Antonio Buonsante
If this has you wondering what a bit of well-placed light could do for your own space, we’d love to hear what you have in mind. Wherever you are in the world, you know who to call.