If there’s one place you might expect to find wine vinified in amphorae, it would be Greece, the country that named the vessel and traded in clay pots for millennia. In fact, contemporary winemakers in Greece have been slow to embrace amphorae. The hesitation, however, has a positive side, for the clay-fermented wines that do make it to the market tend to have a reason for being that’s deeper than fashion.
“When I was a small boy, I remember seeing pitharia,” says Cretan winemaker Nikos Douloufakis, using the Greek word for clay vessels used to ferment wine; amphorae, by definition, have two handles (amphi denotes something with two sides, as in amphibian and amphitheater; amphorae were used for storage and transport). “I’d never thought of using them myself until I went to Prowein eight or nine years ago and tasted some wines from Moldova made in clay.” After tasting others from Georgia and Northern Italy, he decided to give it a try.
“The first question was, where am I going to get one?” he says. Crete, once the center of Minoan civilization, is filled with Bronze-age relics of wine presses and vessels but, by 2010, there wasn’t a single potter left who knew how to make a pithari for wine. “But we have a town, Thrapsanó, where everyone works around terra cotta, and has since Minoan times,” he says. “They do only decorative pieces now, but I went there and asked around to find someone who might make pitharia. Everyone said no, except one guy, who said, ‘Where are you guys coming from?!’”
As it happened, Douloufakis was the third winemaker who’d turned up looking for pitharia. Douloufakis eventually placed an order for ten. The potter made twenty and, in fact, ten broke. Unlike many modern producers of clay vessels, the Thrapsanó potters don’t use molds or gas heat, preferring handwork and wood-fired kilns, both of which give less consistent results.
This is a challenge that has led winemakers to look elsewhere. Yannis Paraskevopoulos at Gai’a sent me photos of beautiful amphorae weeping tears of golden wine; he eventually changed over to using Italian compressed-ceramic rounds for a Santorini he now bottles as Clay Assyrtiko. And when Jérôme Binda at Domaine de Kalathas purchased pitharia for his winery in Tinos, he went to Catalan-ceramicist Carles Llach.
But the bigger issue has been overcoming the stigma associated with “old” styles of wine.
“Going back a decade ago, the Greek wine scene was still dominated by a combination of French-style wines and New World trends,” says Panayiotis Papagiannopoulos, who’s been working with pitharia at Tetramythos since 2008. “Greek wine producers—as well as a big percentage of the society—were galloping quickly to ‘westernization.’” Wine made in ancient clay vessels didn’t fit the image the Greeks wanted to project, even while hipsters from Adelaide to San Francisco were clamoring for amphorae-aged wines from Georgians, Italians and most anyone else who would make them.
One of Papagiannopoulos’s most lauded wines is a Retsina vinified in clay. “Retsina is a traditionally oxidative style of wine, and needs more oxygen than [it gets in] the stainless-steel fermentation,” he says. “Wine in amphorae has more creamy texture, and noble earthy hints.” He’s found that the clay vessels give him a Retsina that’s typically cooling and fresh, but not screamingly resinous. It has balance, body and complexity—characteristics that may have been common in ancient times, when Retsina was made in amphorae sealed with resin, but that are often lost in modern commercial versions vinified in stainless steel.
“Having vineyards with the names Pythos and Upper Pythos, full of broken ancient amphoras, is the call of a place with a continuous history of centuries of winemaking and viticulture.”
—PANAYIOTIS PAPAGIANNOPOULOS, TETRAMYTHOS
Pitharia, in fact, may be what has been missing in modern efforts to tame some of Greece’s more challenging grapes. In Crete, Douloufakis uses his pitharia to vinify liatiko, a local grape that was widely celebrated in Venetian times but has since been lost to obscurity, with little call for its pale color and unusual spicy, sweetsour flavor. Vinified in clay, the variety seems to blossom, with more body and texture to support its sweet, spicy fruit. “It likes oxidation,” Douloufakis explains. “That gives it more expression.” He finds that Dafnios, his oak-aged liatiko, takes two or three years in the bottle to become more expressive. “Out of amphorae,” he says, “it’s expressive right away.”
At Sant’Or in Achaia, Panagiotis Dimitropoulos has released a wine from santameriana, an old variety he’s rehabilitated from a few vines his father grew. He cites history as his inspiration for using amphorae (“in ancient times, here in Greece, all foods were stored or carried in amphorae”), but also, he points to the wine’s strong aromas, evident in his 2018 Santameriana: It’s distinctly fruity with scents of orange blossoms and rose hips, and flavors that recall mango and candied orange slices. It’s entirely unusual in its intensity, and the slight grip of the skin tannins and the earthiness of the clay in which it fermented add a savor that brings it into balance.
Another curious local grape inspired Theodora Rouvalis to work with pitharia at Oenoforos, her family’s winery just outside the Peloponnese port town of Patras. She and her partner, Antonio Ruiz Pañego, first encountered clay-aged wines when they were living in Burgundy; she was doing her MSc in viticulture, and working at Clos de Tart, while Ruiz Pañego was working at Domaine Frédéric Magnien. “In these years, Frédéric started to use jars for some of the best grand cru,” Rouvalis says, “and the results were amazing: much more expressive on the nose, direct and mineral, with power [in the flavors].”


When the couple returned to Greece, they became particularly interested in tsigello, an ancient strain of mavrodaphne, a grape that’s traditionally been made into sweet wines, to assuage its mouth-crushing tannins. “The primary aromas of juicy black fruit and herbs were so lively and present that we didn’t want to lose them with oak intervention,” she says. “But at the same time, we needed to work on the tannins. And that is what the amphora does: Clay is porous, like oak, so it does allow for some oxygen, giving the wine a deep and rich texture, but it’s a neutral material (if made correctly) that won’t impart any additional flavors. It is a nice way to ‘manage’ the tannin potential.”
Recently, they released their second vintage, 2018, vinified in 160-liter clay pots from France. The wine is a deep, velvety red, delivering all the wild spice and wild-berry flavor of the variety without its typically tight, drying tannins—a revelation in mavrodaphne.
Now that amphorae have become a trend worldwide, several Greek producers are looking to reestablish their own regional traditions with pitharia. On Lemnos, Manolis Garalis is trying to reclaim some of the “gouva”—large holes in the shape of amphorae, dug directly into the volcanic soil—once traditional on the island. On Ikaria, the Afianes family is recovering local pitharia for their wines. And, increasingly, winemakers are adopting pitharia as a useful tool.


In Nemea, Dimitri Skouras began experimenting with clay vessels a couple years ago. His father, George Skouras, was instrumental in putting this Peloponnesian region on the world wine map with his potently extracted reds aged in French oak (most notably, Megas Oenos, or Big Wine). “For me, the choice was about creating a new profile,” Dimitri says. “When you age in oak, you get tannins and structure, but aroma as well.” As clay vessels offer some of the same advantages of wood without the added aromas, he decided to import amphorae from Italy. “They seemed to be the safest and most problem free,” he says. “You have to clean most amphorae very carefully, and if they aren’t made well, you can lose four hundred liters of wine out of nowhere.”


He found that the earthenware vessels made the biggest difference when it came to reds. “You get a clearer expression of the fruit,” he says. “It’s more vibrant, with more complexity than you get from tanks.” Whites, on the other hand—especially the light and floral moschofilero grown in nearby Mantinia—tend to lose their varietal character in clay. “It creates complexity and volume, but loses on the character of the variety.”
To get around this, he developed something completely different: a blend of moschofilero fermented with some of its skins in amphorae, tank-fermented syrah, and agiorgitiko aged in acacia barrels. The result, Peplo, is a deep rose-gold wine with an earthy richness bolstering its savory red-fruit notes. “For us, it’s a gastronomic rosé,” Skouras says—with a versatility at the dinner table that the floral, pink-skinned moschofilero never really achieved in stainless steel.
is W&S’s editor at large and covers the wines of the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe for the magazine.
This story appears in the print issue
of August 2020.
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