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Crowds at wine tasting rooms ebb and flow depending on the season, so Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture in Portland faced a challenge. For Sokol Blosser Winery in Dayton, he needed to design a room that was big enough to hold up to 200 people but didn’t pack them in like marinated sardines in the summer or echo like an empty gymnasium in the winter.

What Cloepfil came up with, according to Michael Brown, director of consumer sales and marketing for Sokol Blosser Winery, is sheer genius – and one of the most unique wine tasting rooms in the country.

“There is nothing like it,” Brown said. “We did research for a couple of years and saw hundreds of tasting rooms. There is literally nothing else like this in the country.”

The 6,500-square-foot building opened to the public this month. It contains a mixture of smaller and larger spaces that handle visitors admirably, Brown said.

“That was the real challenge we put to the architecture team,” he said. “You have a peak season in the summer. Then you have an off season. How do you design a space that can fit both? Allied (Works) Architecture did an incredible job. You can put up to 200 people in the building, and they still look spread out. Conversely, you can have just a few people, and it doesn’t look cavernous.”

The building is flooded with natural light and other features that inspire Alison Sokol Blosser, co-president of the winery, to call the project “a work of art inside and out.”

The interior and exterior walls consist of striated wooden cladding made with tight knot cedar, Douglas fir and hickory. The form of the building and placement of windows and skylights allow the sun to create geometric patterns that move with the earth inside and outside on the terraces, Brown said.

The building also includes a library with volumes on wine history, as well as a double-sided fireplace that faces the entry foyer and main room.

Brown said the new tasting room is the first winery building in the United States in contention for Living Building Challenge international green building certification.

“As it measures the holistic impact of the building, the new tasting room’s performance will be tracked through the first year of operation with certification anticipated in July 2014,” Brown said.

Sustainability is a vital part of the winery, Sokol Blosser said.

“We feel a sense of social responsibility in conducting our business and our lives the way we do,” she said. “This is the only way we could imagine doing it.”

The tasting room fits in with that philosophy, she added.

“Our goal was to again raise the caliber of the wine experience in Oregon to meet the new demand of the increasingly savvy wine and design visitors,” Sokol Blosser said.

She added that the new facility succeeds admirably.

Planning for the project to replace the winery’s 35-year-old, 1,000-square-foot tasting room began more than two years ago.

“We were really constrained by space,” Brown said. “We did a small renovation on the old tasting room, but we quickly learned we needed more physical room.”

Construction started in September 2012, and the facility formally opened on July 1 – the original target date.

Brown said he is not sure if the building ranks among the largest tasting facilities in the world, but it definitely isn’t midsize.

“As hospitality spaces for wineries go, we’re on the bigger size absolutely,” he said. “We’ve created a space that’s on par with the finest tasting room in the world.”

The project cost $2 million, according to Yamhill County building records.

Designing the tasting room was a bit of a homecoming for Cloepfil, the lead architect for the project. He was born and raised in the Dundee area.

“If the visitor to Sokol Blosser experiences an insight and deeper perception of the area and is moved to ponder and wonder, then this building will have succeeded,” he said.