The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone
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| Type | Private |
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| Established | 1995 |
| Undergraduates | 300 |
| Location | 2555 Main Street, St. Helena, California 94574 |
| Campus | Suburban |
| Nickname | The CIA at Greystone |
| Website | Official website |
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Greystone Cellars
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Emblem of the Culinary Institute
of America |
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| Coordinates | 38°30′52″N 122°29′2″W / 38.51444°N 122.48389°WCoordinates: 38°30′52″N 122°29′2″W / 38.51444°N 122.48389°W |
| Area | 13 acres (5.3 ha) |
| Built | 1888 |
| Architect | Percy & Hamilton |
| Architectural style | Other, Romanesque Revival, Richardson Romanesque |
| NRHP Reference # | 78000725 |
| Added to NRHP | August 10, 1978 |
The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone is a branch campus of the private culinary college the Culinary Institute of America. The Greystone campus, located on State Route 29/128 in St. Helena, California, offers associate degrees and two certificate programs in culinary arts and baking and pastry arts. The CIA at Greystone and the Culinary Institute of America at Copia make up the school's California branch.
The campus' primary facility is a 117,000-square-foot (10,900 m2) stone building, known as Greystone Cellars and built for William Bowers Bourn II as a cooperative wine cellar in 1889. Hamden McIntyre designed the gravity flow winery along with other wineries of the decade. The building changed ownership several times, and was notably owned by the Christian Brothers as a winery from 1945 to 1989. It was used as a winery until its sale to the school in 1993, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
The Greystone campus is situated in and around the Greystone Cellars building, which William Bowers Bourn II conceived as a business concept. His father, William Bowers Bourn Sr., was wealthy from ownership of the gold mine the Empire Mine, as well as co-ownership of a shipping company. Bourn II was a businessman with business interests and residences around California, although he had spent his summers during his youth at White Sulphur Springs Resort in St. Helena, before his parents bought Madroño, an estate in the town.
Around the 1880s, San Francisco wine dealers were purchasing wine from Napa Valley vintners at low prices (sometimes around 15 to 18 cents per gallon). The dealers had facilities to store and age wines that most Napa Valley vintners lacked, and thus were able to purchase wine from the vintners at low prices. Because of this, Bourn began a campaign to build the cooperative winery; he was in his early 30s at the time. He created a business partnership with another businessman, E. Everett Wise, who was of a similar age. Bourn then asked for support within the Napa County wine industry. Bourn met with Henry Pellet, president of the St. Helena Vinicultural Club, who endorsed the idea and encouraged his associates to do the same. Bourn and Wise ended up gathering enough support from the local wine industry, and they hired George Percy and Frederick F. Hamilton of the San Francisco architectural firm Percy & Hamilton to design the Greystone Cellars, along with Italian stonemasons to build the façades, and the Ernest L. Ransome firm to handle concrete work. The plans involved the use of new materials and technology of the time, including the relatively new Portland cement. The cement was used as mortar and also poured over the iron reinforcing rods built within the first and second floor elevations. The heavy timber construction of the third floor provided structural support for not only that floor's cask, barrel and bottle aging space but also for the gravity-flow crushing area located on the floor above. The architects planned for the cellars to hold two million gallons of wine at a time, with thirteen tunnels in the hillside behind the building to hold another million gallons. Those tunnels collapsed due to effects of water seepage and of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
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