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.

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,[5] along with Italian stonemasons to build the façades, and the Ernest L. Ransome firm to handle concrete work.

[6]: 825  Greystone was also the first California winery to be operated and illuminated by electricity, produced by a boiler and gas generator located in a mechanical room below the building's central front wing.

[4]: 115–6 He sold the building at a low price that year, to Charles Carpy, who deeded the property to the California Wine Association.

A year later, the Bisceglia brothers of San Jose purchased Greystone where they produced sacramental wine under the same label until 1930,[5] and again beginning in October 1933.

[3] The Carpy family maintained part of the land, including a Victorian house nicknamed Albert's Villa south of the winery.

The Christian Brothers sold the property in 1989 because of declining market shares and vineyard yields, and the costs of seismically retrofitting Greystone.

[3] The Heublein Company of Canada purchased the property and marketing rights to the Christian Brothers' brands in 1990, shortly after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake occurred.

The college intends to open a campus, the Culinary Institute of America at Copia, which will house the CIA's new Food Business School.

[11] The Greystone Cellars building stands on a terraced hillside site on the west side of 29/128, about a mile north of St. Helena's central business district.

[5] The projection also includes a 20-by-20-foot (6.1 m × 6.1 m) stone tower that extends one story above the roof and was built to hold a large water tank.

[6]: 826 The interior has two distinct wings with a large hallway between them, originally with an iron staircase and a hydraulic ram elevator both leading to the third floor.

[13] The primary school building is the Greystone Cellars building, which houses teaching kitchens, the Wine Spectator Greystone Restaurant, the Bakery Café by illy, the Spice Islands Marketplace (the campus store), the De Baun and Ecolab Theatres (auditoriums and cooking demonstration facilities, also used as lecture halls), and administrative offices.

Its appliances and equipment were donated by Viking Range Corporation's founders and installed as part of a comprehensive redesign of the building's first floor in 2010.

The Wine Spectator Greystone Restaurant (WSGR) was run by students in the associate degree program in culinary arts.

The restaurant focused on using local and seasonal ingredients, and the dining room had open cooking stations to give diners a full view of the working kitchen.

The Guest House is located on-campus and the Vineyard Lodges are about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) from the campus, with shuttle service to and from the buildings.

The school planned for an environmentally-oriented dormitory, with solar panels to cover some of the building's electrical needs, as well as a membrane system for waste water.