Action research as a tool for collecting private information from Spanish wineries for further architectural bioclimatic analysis: lessons from behind the scenes

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1996081/v2

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Action research as a tool for collecting private information from Spanish wineries for further architectural bioclimatic analysis: lessons from behind the scenes

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1996081/v2

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Geographically diagnosing the usage of sustainable bioclimatic architectural practices in wineries is most of the time complicated. This difficulty stems from the unavailability in the scientific literature of private documents, such as the actual full architectural plans and projects of constructed wineries. This article reflects on the action research process that supported and explored the learning process during a large-scale data gathering effort involving a research team, and a universe of more than 4800 wineries in the Spanish Geography. The whole process was part of a larger project whose acronym is Cowinergy, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity. Results highlight the importance of process facilitation in a value chain of learning, in order to create an environment in which the wineries felt at ease when collaborating with the research team. The facilitators designed the process to be iterative so the learning activities where consistently aligned with the needs of the overall project, thus ensuring practical relevance.

Action research

sustainability

participatory action

bioclimatic design

winery

The Cowinergy project (CW), funded by the government of Spain, focused on wine ageing rooms. This project continues a line of research consolidated by two projects of the Spanish National R&D call: the BIA2004-03266 project named “Underground construction for wineries; Eco-construction systems for quality wines” and the BIA2009-09567 project entitled: “Underground constructions for wineries, a model for saving energy through construction systems; Study of hygrothermal conditions, ventilation and simulation models ".

Both projects focused on the study and analysis of underground constructions of ageing rooms. The results obtained so far have allowed the research team to determine: (i) the most influential factors that condition the interior environment of underground ageing rooms; (ii) establish design guidelines and generate simulation models to optimize the construction of new underground ageing rooms and; (iii) improve the interior conditions of existing cellars.

The research focused on the energy savings that can be achieved within the design of the building itself, as the first line of defense before using energy generated by fossil fuels, to maintain ideal hygrothermal conditions in ageing rooms. This article gives an account of the methods and materials used to fulfill the three specific objectives to begin the CW project. The research team used a participatory action research approach, for discovery, comparison and experimentation, collaborating with members of the system to study it. This is because the CW project provided an environment for learning on the fly or during the research stage (Arayici 2010).

Construction engineering needs an approach that combines the objectives of basic and applied research, contributing to the solution of practical problems and the creation of theoretical knowledge at the same time. An appropriate approach for this purpose is participatory action research, where the researcher reviews the current situation (problem field), identifies the problem, engages in the introduction of changes for improvement, evaluates the effects of such changes, and reflects about the process and results to generate new knowledge (Azhar, Salman and Sein 2010).

Participatory action research collaborates simultaneously in the resolution of practical problems and in the expansion of scientific knowledge, which at the same time improves the competences of the actors participating in it. It is executed collaboratively in an immediate situation, giving feedback in a cyclical process, which points to a growing understanding of the process of change in social systems, under a mutually accepted ethical framework (Hult and Lennung 1980; Azhar, Salman and Sein 2010).

Moreover, the CW project´s participatory action research perspective works through cycles of five phases, requiring the previous establishment of working conditions between researchers, participants and the field where they operate. The first phase is diagnostic, with which a holistic look is given to the problem and theoretical assumptions are made about it, by the hand of researchers and participants; subsequently follows the planning of the action, in which the direction of the actions to be exercised and the focus from which they will be executed is directed; this gives way to direct action, which is executed collaboratively; After this, the evaluation of the results continues under a critical scheme, whether or not they have been functional; to close with specific learning, whether practical on the problem, or academic towards organized knowledge. After a cycle of 5 phases (Fig. 1), another one can be initiated according to the success of the strategies implemented in the practical situation, and the practical or academic information needs. (Azhar, Salman and Sein 2010).

Each stage of research has its own particular objectives and its own cycle of participatory action, which sometimes implies certain rethinking and changes of action on the fly, without this implying a change in the objectives, as it can be seen during the development of the present document.

PLANNING

In a first stage, the research group had already decided that the following design aspects, among others not directly related to bioclimatic design in architecture, should be identified in as many wineries as possible: (a) type of ageing room; (b) wall thickness; (c) relative humidity modifying devices; (d) ventilation; (e) energy storage structures; (f) specialized roof systems; (g) fixed solar protection elements; (h) color of the exterior wall; (i) green walls and; (j) orientation of the green wall. The survey process was carried out with the former questions. However, after the publication of a literature review (Arredondo-Ruiz et al. 2020), as a reconsideration due to the participatory action approach, it was determined that the most important bioclimatic design factors affecting above ground or partially above ground ageing rooms were: (a) shape, (b) orientation and (c) building envelope characteristics. In this regard, the research team set the following objectives.

General Objective

To promote the concept of almost zero energy consumption of cellars for the aging of red wine. Figure 2, gives graphic detail of the general objective and the specific objectives.

Specific Objectives

Three specific objectives (Fig. 3) were derived from the general objective, in which the large amount of time and activities allocated to the first contrasts, when compared to what was allocated in those areas for the second and third objectives. This is explained by the informational needs of the project, which required the purification of a large amount of information as a requirement to achieve the second and third objectives. In addition, achieving the first specific objective produced large databases to be used in later stages of the CW project (Please visit the following URL to learn more about the CW project: https://bodegasestudio.com/en/home-2/).

The specific objectives are listed below.

To characterize in large scale, the usage of constructive designs and passive bioclimatic strategies
To select cellars representing the main constructive designs that incorporate a wide range of passive bioclimatic solutions

To characterize the constructive aspects of the selected cellars

To meet the objectives, a large-scale study was carried out to characterize the bioclimatic architectural solutions within Spanish wineries during 2017. The study was aimed at the technical managers of the wineries.

During the project, the main tool was the survey, which used open-ended and multiple-choice questions. These questions addressed the quantitative part and an open question, at the end of the survey, addressed the qualitative part. The facilitator acted as listener, synthesizer, reporter, observer, among other functions (O'Brien 2001). The purpose of the survey was to identify the use of bioclimatic design solutions in Spanish wineries. Before the final application of the survey, the activities detailed in section 5 were carried out. While the survey progressed, the technical managers of the wineries who met the requirements of the second specific objective were contacted, willing to share the complete architectural projects of their wineries. Six field visits to these wineries were visited to collect the aforementioned documents.

During the compilation process, a photographic survey of the visited wineries was carried out. Once the projects were compiled, the design characterization phase of the selected wineries was carried out. The information obtained both in the survey and during the visits was organized into descriptive files allowing the research team to assess the situation in the light of the bioclimatic design of wineries. Figure 3 shows the general outline of the research process.

Figure 4, gives a general overview of what is about to be described in the following lines.

Database creation

The first challenge of this endeavor was to create a complete database of Spanish Wineries using the technique of successive approximations:

The first step was the identification of wineries registered in one of 66 regulatory councils of Spanish wine appellations of Origin (D.O.), which were contacted to request the lists of member wineries from them. The first database was generated from the listings available through the regulatory councils, and it was named BDO; it contained a total of 3,836 wineries.
At the same time, a very comprehensive database was accessed; the Spanish Yellow Pages online, with a clearly commercial phone book focus. The search keywords were: winery, wine and wines. Thus, a record of 3,863 wineries was obtained. This database was then manually purged, freeing it of all those companies that were not actually wineries, as well as those wineries that had already been identified in the BDO database. Once the two previous aspects had been overcome, a database of 1,056 records was obtained and it was called BPA, which only contained wineries that did not belong to any regulatory council of appellation of origin.

Survey design, preliminary tests and course correction

After a preliminary attempt to contact the wineries via email and its subsequent debugging, it was decided to conduct a telephone survey. A few adjustments were then made to the original survey before the actual phone calls were made. This survey investigated the type of constructive design of ageing rooms (aboveground, underground, basement, etc.), analyzing the use of complementary passive bioclimatic solutions: envelope thickness, natural ventilation (concavities, ventilation shafts, etc.), integrated sun protection (eaves, building external color, green roofs, etc.), peripheral sun protection (porches, cornices, nearby vegetation, etc.), peripheral mobile protection (awnings, blinds, slats, etc.), evaporative cooling (placement of bodies of water inside enclosures, wet filters, fountains, etc.), orientation of the building, singular location of the building, shape.

The survey also made it possible to identify the characteristics and use of air conditioning equipment, in addition to the use of alternative energy sources (geothermal, biomass, solar photovoltaic) to supply energy demand.

Mass email sending

A mass email sending application (MaxBulk Mailer Pro) took care of this part of the project. It took almost 40 hours to send 2,263 emails. Despite all the effort and message personalization, the email campaign only got 30 responses. Given the limited results, it was concluded that mass e-mailing was not an efficient tool for polling wineries.

Telephone surveying campaign

The campaign began in two autonomous communities (Madrid and Andalusia), but once finished, it was decided to complement the database generated from the yellow pages, obtaining lists of wineries of the 66 appellations of origin. In total, the lists of wineries obtained from the 66 D.O. produced 3,539 wineries. The total, removing those that were already in the yellow pages list, and adding those that were not, yielded a total of 5,214 wineries. However, there were problems with the updating and consistency of the lists.

The telephone campaign resulted in 377 surveyed wineries, (see Annex 1). However, some concepts such as region, climate type, apellation of origin and coordinates were added after the survey campaign ended.

Visits To Wine Fairs And Events

The research team visited two highly relevant wine events in Spain: FENAVIN (“the benchmark fair for Spanish wine”) with around 1,500 participant wineries; and the Hall of the best Spanish wines (organized by the Peñín guide), with more than 400 wineries presenting only high-quality Spanish wines. The social component of this action was very important for the project.

Survey capture

Google Forms is a free tool that operates online, in which you can create surveys (Fig. 5). It allows editing the questions simply with a click. While the survey was being applied, the collected data was automatically stored in an excel like spreadsheet in the Google cloud.

The telephone campaign began with the lists obtained from the regulatory councils of each of the 66 appellations of origin. Each winery was called in alphabetical order. If the contact was not available, the research team would later tried calling on three different occasions, after that, the contacting phase stopped and the contact was considered unreachable. Figure 5 shows the first page (to keep this paper brief) of the interface generated in google forms to capture the data from the respondents. It should be noted that the respondents never had access to the survey.

By having a good amount of information available to meet the first specific objective, it was necessary to organize and analyze the data, and again a decision-making process on the fly took place, in order to undertake the second objective.

Database organization

During the telephone campaign, a large amount of data was collected, this implied an important organizational work, which required the use of the "Filemaker Pro" database software for its management. A database was created with the results of the surveys. The creation of the catalog of bioclimatic solutions data sheets (Figs. 6 & 7), learning how to use the “Filemaker Pro” application, adding coordinates, descriptive text, maps and photographs to the first hundred surveys, was a research task that took approximately two hundred hours. An important variable in creating the technical sheet and the winery album was finding a suitable design pattern. A data sheet was designed within the File Maker Pro application, which was then divided into 4 parts (Figs. 6 and 7):

An Introduction, with general information about the winery, such as the characteristics of the climate and place, the winery, the vineyards, its wines, etc. 3 photos of the building were placed in different construction perspective, which allows a quick review of the bioclimatic solutions, in addition to an urban photo at a 50 m scale. where you can see the integration of the building in the environment.
A Two photograph section featuring the roof, the façade, geographical coordinates of the site, and an internet link that facilitating access to the location.
Another section with the results of the survey of bioclimatic solutions, which in turn was divided into 6 sections: Identification and location; type of production; ageing room; ventilation and lighting systems; air conditioning and humidity control and; energy.
A final section with four Maps at a scales of 500 km, 200 km, 2 km and 200 m. Which allowed the visualization of the winery's geographical location.

For its final presentation, the information obtained was processed into a PDF of 4 A4 size sheets, each one with the name of the winery, its numerical identification, appellation of origin, province and page number. As this information became available, the research group selected those wineries that met the requirements of specific objective 2, that is: representative wineries of the main construction designs, incorporating a wide range of passive bioclimatic solutions and / or sources of alternative energy.

The search for winery projects

An excel list was constructed, based on the data generated during the telephone survey campaign, with the following columns: winery, name of the architect or engineer who designed the winery, address (of the winery), telephone number and contact person. This document gave rise to phase one of contacting wineries, which consisted on calling the architects mentioned by the respondents during their respective surveys. For the second stage, number 302 of a Spanish magazine known as "ON" was used. This particular number of the magazine was dedicated to the architecture of wineries. Afterwards, a Google search was performed to obtain the contact information of the wineries. In a third phase, the contacts that were generated during the telephone survey campaign were contacted (figures 8 and 9).

Contact with the architects (original designers of some of the surveyed wineries)

In this first attempt, the excel data was filtered in order to identify the name of the architect in charge of the design of each cellar, this data was not always available during the polling phase. Then the architects' telephones were searched on Google, 45 wineries were contacted and then it was time to move on to the second stage. However, these searches were slow, so this stage was terminated before calling all listed architects, for practical purposes.

By the beginning of 2016, it had been quite difficult to contact most of the architects, engineers and other contacts that would supposedly lead the team to comply with the objectives. Furthermore, it seemed even more complicated to obtain authorization and commitment to share information within the timelines that the research demanded. One of the lessons left by the "learning by doing" concept in the participatory action research methodology was: the rethinking for future stages and / or projects in terms of contact methods, and the times available to owners, managers and architects of the wineries, as well as considering the vintage period, which is the busiest.

Field trips

After the telephone survey campaign was completed, a number of wineries willing to continue cooperating in this research project were identified (see figure 8). This allowed 6 field visits to different apellations of origin for the compilation of complete projects of the wineries in question.

The total number of projects collected in the different actions was 54, 31 of which came from field trips and the rest from other actions.

Field trip reviews 2016-2017

Field trip 1: December 16, 2016

Objetive 1: Getting 1 complete project in Mota del Cuervo (Cuenca) from the “Cooperativa del Campo Nuestra Señora de Manjavacas” cellar.
Comments: This trip was made in a single day, the data of the winery was obtained from the yellow pages database.
When speaking with the person in charge (Juan Fuente Rus) and asking him if he could let us copy the project, he agreed on the condition that we went pick it up at their premises.
Favorable experiences of the field trip: The proximity allowed going and returning in the same day with a very large and complete project.
Negative experiences: There is nothing to declare in this section.
Projects achieved: 1/1 Projects.

Field trip 2: January 12-14, 2017

Objective: Achieve three complete projects in Requena, Alcoi and Santa Cruz De La Zarza
Favorable experiences of the field trip: Dominio de la Vega winery contacted us with the engineering firm that designed the winery (INGESTEC) and a collaboration agreement was made with them.
Negative experiences: The Celler la Muntanya project could not be obtained because the owner when contacted said that he had the complete project, but when we got there he said that he only had the plans. In the case of Bodegas la Estación, the contact had to leave for family reasons so the visit got cancelled in the last minute.
Achieved Projects: Only one project was obtained, that of the Dominio de la Vega winery. From Bodegas la Estación (D.O. Mancha) the project was not obtained because the manager could not attend the appointment. From Celler la Muntanya only the plans were available because it is a self-built micro-winery and without a project.
Number of photographs:
- Bodegas Dominio de la Vega: 84
- Celler la Muntanya: 48
- Bodegas La Estación: 18

Field trip 3: February 13-17, 2017

Objective: To get 12 complete projects and make a photographic survey in wineries of the following appellations of origin: Ribera del Duero, La Rioja and Wines of the Land of León.
Comments: This trip took place the week of February 13 to 17 and mainly visited the denominations of Ribera del Duero, La Rioja and briefly that of Vinos de la Tierra de León.
Favorable experiences of the field trip: Both the Ribera del Duero and Rioja wineries have been characterized by being very participatory during this project. People have been very generous and have trusted us with their projects. It was very practical to use the booking.com mobile application that compares prices and you can book the accommodation instantly, which is convenient if you need to decide where to stay on short notice.
Negative experiences
- The high price of photocopying / scanning.
- Two wineries could only be visited at night and not enough photos were obtained (Mauro and Olmaza).
- When trying to visit many wineries, the contacts change the dates on which they can receive us and we have to change the entire planning and call the other contacts to reschedule.
Projects : 10
Photographs: 305
Visited cellars: Real Sitio de Ventosilla; Bodegas Mauro; Gallego-Zapatero; Olmaza (Gil Varela); Vinos Santos Arranz; Julio Crespo; Bohórquez; Baigorri; San Cristóbal; Campo Viejo; Herrero Vedel and; Sierra.

Field trip 4: March 13-17, 2017

Objective: To gather 8 sets of documents that could include complete projects, and photos of 14 wineries in the Ribera del Duero, La Rioja and 1 winery of the Rueda appellation of origin.
Favorable experiences of the field trip: Both the Ribera del Duero and Rioja wineries have been characterized by being very participatory during this project. People have been very generous and have trusted us with their projects. Photos were shot from 4 wineries whose projects were already in our possession.
Negative experiences:
- The high price of photocopying / scanning.
- When trying to visit many wineries, the contacts change the dates on which they can be visited so the entire planning changes and a lot of rescheduling is necessary.
Visited wineries:

1. Real de Nájera; 2. Bodegas Mateos; 3. Señorío de las Viñas; 4. Bodegas Murúa; 5. Bodega Proelio; 6. Bodegas y Viñedos Álvarez Alfaro; 7. Bodegas Tritium; 8. Vivanco; 9. Pascual Miguel; 10. Ibáñez Blanco; 11. Bodega Sardonia; 12. Bodegas Rento; 13. Bodega Tr3smano and; 14. Bodegas Peñafiel.

Field trip 5 : June 12-22, 2017

Objective: To get 26 complete projects and photos of 26 wineries in the Ribera del Duero, la Rioja and 1 winery at the Rueda appellation of origin.
Favorable experiences of the field trip: This trip was used to make a longer visit that also included a tasting at the Campo Viejo winery, from which we had to photocopy a part of the project that we needed to complete the budgets. It is important to note that: (1) Campoviejo has the largest breeding facility in Europe; (2) It is one of the most bioclimatic in Spain (it is almost totally underground, it has a green roof); (3) At the time, the application of industrialized construction systems was novel; (4) 100% of the energy it uses is renewable and; (5) It has been awarded for its adaptation to the landscape.
Negative experiences: The disadvantage of this trip is that the original plan was to gather 26 projects but in the end only 9 were gathered because two wineries that were going to provide 4 (Bodega Tritium) and 7 (Bodegas Rento) projects did not provide them. The cellar with the 7 projects could have been rescheduled to pick up the projects. The field trip could have been organized better but a motorcycle accident of the main author delayed the organization and there was bad communication with a couple of wineries that in the end did not provide any projects. The Tritium winery changed our appointment twice, a thing which changed the entire field trip, which in turn affected the other appointments, making it it necessary to spend more time in La Rioja to be able to collect the projects. Total projects: 9
Number of photographs: 270

Field trip 6: July 26-28, 2017

Objective: To gather 8 complete projects and pictures from 3 wineries in the appellations of origin of Ribera del Duero, Toro and Rueda.
Favorable experiences of the visit: Four projects were obtained from a single source: the Matarromera group, which had originally offered 7 projects. The wineries of this group are located in the following appellations of origin: Rueda, Ribera del Duero, Cigales and Toro. Likewise, the Matarromera group provided a project that had not been built. The Peñafiel and Resalte de Peñafiel wineries contributed one project each.
Negative experiences: The disadvantage of this trip was that the Agrícola Sanz winery (Antonio Sanz), could not recover the second part of the project (pending delivery) on time, which rendered impossible to collect because the winery was in the process of succession. On the other hand, in the Matarromera group, provided the authors of this article with several projects. However, it was only possible to photographically document the visit of the main winery: Emina Ribera.
Projects: 9
Number of photographs: 91.

Review article publication

A review article (titled “Designs for energy‐efficient wine cellars (ageing rooms): a review”) was published in January of 2020 in the Australian Journal of Wine and Grape Research). The article reviewed the literature on climatic aspects and design principles in ageing rooms. The main idea behind this activity was to expose the climatic and thermal functions of ageing rooms. The intention was to clarify the efficiency of the various typologies, such as underground and aboveground to reduce the energy consumption of the wineries. In addition, it showed the impact of different design strategies to improve wine comfort, that is, to maintain the ideal hygrothermal conditions during wine ageing.

The information gathering process went from an amplitude in the first selection of wineries, to a concretion that culminated in 6 field visits during which, projects were gathered to complete the second specific objective. The ammount of information throughout the process was vast and had to be treated, cataloged, some of it analyzed and the rest was stored for further analysis at later stages of the CW project.

Results of the first specific objective

Initially, the yellow pages seemed like a great option for finding wineries. However, the actual number of useful wineries was low (1,236) compared to the initial number (3,836), despite this, it should be noted that 1,112 cellars were eliminated from this database because they were already present in the D.O. database. In addition, when the telephone survey campaign began, 527 wineries in this database no longer existed as a company.

Surveys are very tedious and time consuming for researchers, but qualitative questions revealed key information that led to finding more contacts in the wine industry, which in turn led to 5 complete architectural projects being sourced directly from the designer rather than from the relationships established with the wineries. Other engineering companies showing interest were contacted, but did not provide further projects before the deadline for completing the project collection phase.

Telephone surveys are never as effective as those that are administered in person. Visits to fairs allowed to personally meet many of the interviewees, who communicated the importance of personal interaction when requesting sensitive information. By the time the fairs were visited, the telephone survey campaigns were over. However, as some of the interviewees expressed it, it would have been much faster (a large number of wineries were concentrated in one place) and it would have been easier (face-to-face interaction) to obtain a response to the survey in person and probably the effectiveness of the survey. The campaign would have been greater, both in the number of projects and in the number of surveys.

In the process of obtaining full copies of winery projects, which involved a series of field trips across much of Spain, many drawbacks arose, even when the winery owners / managers had agreed to provide the documents. The problems appeared in the form of incomplete projects, adaptation projects of older non-winery buildings, lost projects, other projects were no longer available at the winery, etc.

The large number of activities described above served the first specific objective, to characterize on a large scale the use of constructive designs and complementary passive bioclimatic strategies in the ageing rooms of Spanish wineries. From this large scale, the number of activities is reduced, but not their importance, since the information filter sifts and yields more concise results. Since this article is about the method, we will not get into the details of the characterization of the wineries will be left out in this paper because that would be an article in itself.

Results of the second specific objective

Once the large-scale characterization was carried out, the next step was to select 5 wineries that fulfilled the second specific objective. Representative wineries were studied in search for bioclimatic solutions in their ageing rooms. For this, the following criteria were used:

Construction date should be slightly earlier or later than the year 2005, in which the Spanish Technical Building Code entered into force. The above to ensure more comparability among projects.
Selected wineries should produce more than 30 thousand liters of wine per year, guaranteeing the project of an operation with a greater degree of professionalization.
That the project includes at least the plans, budgets and design report (a document known as “memoria” in Spanish projects). These documents are essential for the series of calculations and parameters required for the study.

In addition to the aforementioned criteria, the research team decided to choose two basement projects and three aboveground aging room projects, so both types could be more comparable.

The particular cases of the Campo Viejo and Aalto wineries are worth mentioning because the former has received numerous awards for its efficient design and the latter because it incorporates a highly effective technology, which until now has had little adoption in Spanish aging rooms: geothermal energy (although it is not the object of this study). These two extra criteria of choice follow the flexibility afforded by the participatory action research approach (see figure 10).

Results of the third specific objective

Once the wineries were selected and the second specific objective was fulfilled, it was possible to solve the third specific object, which implied a more detailed characterization of the construction aspects in the aging rooms, directly on the selected wineries.

To meet the third specific objective, as shown in the results section, each of the ageing rooms was characterized from the most important points of view identified in the bibliographic research: (i) the typology (buried, above ground, basement, etc.); (ii) orientation; (iii) the form and; (iv) the envelope. Here too for space reasons the full details of the characterization will be left for another article.

3.4 Other results

Result 1. The participatory action research method was extremely successful in gathering information that otherwise cannot be obtained from traditional scholar sources. For this reason, the authors deemed it necessary to publish a web portal (that is constantly being updated) where the results of posterior studies of the materials can be seen through video, plans and other documents. The portal’s web address is as follows: https://bodegasestudio.com/. The web resource has three language options; Spanish, English and Chinese.

Result 2. As mentioned before, a high-quality literature review (Arredondo-Ruiz et al. 2020) was published after the surveying process took place. This knowledge also helped shape objective 3 and gave a deep insight into the subject matter of bioclimatic architecture in ageing rooms.

The participatory action approach allowed to learn, correct and redirect actions in real time, with important annotations to be used in the future of this or other related projects. Finally, results could be gathered and presented in the development of the overall research project.

The method has helped the research team in finding the contacts and the documents to address the climatic aspects of the wineries to help avoid, as much as possible, the contributions of artificial energy, as the first line of defense against expensive energy bills, associated with higher electricity consumption.

The human element played a defining role in each step of the research work. The degree of effectiveness of communication between the parties (interviewer and respondents) depended largely on human values such as empathy. During the project collection stage, the presence of the father of the main author gave confidence to the owner of a project so he allowed copies to be made of it; which exemplifies how such factors steer research in unforeseeable ways, seemingly innate to human social systems.

Ethical Approval

This research did not contain any studies involving animal or human participants, nor did it take place on any private or protected areas. No specific permissions were required for corresponding locations.

Competing interests

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. All co-authors have seen and agree with the contents of the manuscript and there is no financial interest to report. We certify that the submission is original work and is not under review at any other publication.

Authors' contributions

Fernando Arredondo-Ruiz and Ignacio Cañas took part in the design of the work. Data analysis and interpretation was made by the first author (Fernando Arredondo-Ruiz). The critical revision of the article was done by the María Teresa Gómez-Villarino). All authors (Fernando Arredondo-Ruiz, Ignacio Cañas and Maria Teresa Gómez-Villarino) approved the final version to be published.

Funding

This research was carried out as part of the research project BIA2014-54291-R, entitled "Bioclimatic design strategies in wine cellars as nearly zero-energy buildings models", funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain.

Availability of data and materials

Supplemental data regarding the COWINERGY project may be viewed at www.bodegasestudio.com

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Arredondo-Ruiz F, Cañas I, Mazarrón FR, Manjarrez-Domínguez CB (2020) Designs for energy-efficient wine cellars (ageing rooms): a review. Aust J Grape Wine Res 26:9–28
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Annex 1 is not available with this version

No competing interests reported.

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Action research as a tool for collecting private information from Spanish wineries for further architectural bioclimatic analysis: lessons from behind the scenes

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Abstract

Figures

Introduction

PLANNING

General Objective

Specific Objectives

CYCLES OF PARTICIPATORY ACTION

Database creation

Survey design, preliminary tests and course correction

Mass email sending

Telephone surveying campaign

Visits To Wine Fairs And Events

Survey capture

FIRST RESULTS ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION CYCLE

Database organization

SECOND AND FINAL ACTION CYCLE

DEFINE RESULTS

Conclusions

Declarations

References

Annex

Additional Declarations

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