Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The former co-operative cellar of Paziols, built between 1914 and 1917, is a remarkable wine building by its centered architectural plan, designed by Jules-Pierre Reverdy. The latter, already author of the cellar of Lézignan (1909), innovates here with a square at the corners, a reinforced concrete frame (Hennebique system) and a central lantern. The main façade, equipped with a forebody on a floor, houses a large carriageway door surmounted by a arch in the middle of the hangar, giving access to the vats organized in peripheral crown and in central islets. A Decauville railway runs there to facilitate the transportation of presses and marcs.

Construction, initiated in 1914 by the cooperative society founded on December 24, 1913, was interrupted by the First World War. The walls were finished, but the tanks and the cover remained unfinished until 1917, when the president of the cellar, on permission, obtained the funds to finalize the reinforced concrete roof. Faced with the shortage of iron, he appealed to Julien Charpeil, representative of the company Hennebique in Toulouse, who realized the structure according to a protected patent. This technical choice, dictated by war, is a lasting sign of the identity of the building.

As early as 1920, the cellar, which had become too small, underwent two major enlargements: a left-backed cellar, and a right-hand extension taking over the initial but larger plan. Reverdy and Charpeil work together again, using a metal frame similar to that of the Caramany cellar (Pyrénées-Orientales). The following decades saw further developments (cuveries in 1959, 1963, 1964, and 1976), as well as the construction of a bottling unit. Despite mergers and partial abandonment of the premises, the building, classified as a Historic Monument in 2013, remains an exceptional testimony of the industrial architecture of wine and the technical innovations of the period.

The building is distinguished by its spatial organization: a vessel on the basement floor with peripheral and central tanks, supporting bottom posts that support the structure. The adjacent, more traditional cellar has a two-row longitudinal vessel. The wharfs, added later, facilitate logistics operations. The cellar thus illustrates the evolution of winemaking techniques and the adaptation to economic and historical constraints, while embodying the wine cooperative heritage of Languedoc.

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