Three words for one idea#
Every wine region with clay under its feet has fermented wine in it. Georgia calls the vessel a qvevri, Armenia a karas, and the Mediterranean, from Rome to today’s Tuscany, an amphora. Guests on my tours use the three words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the differences are worth twenty minutes at a table in Kakheti or Vayots Dzor, because they explain why an amber Rkatsiteli from a buried qvevri, a karas-aged Areni Noir from Rind and a Ribolla Gialla from a Georgian jar sunk into Italian soil taste as different as they do.
I pour all three on my tours, next to wines from steel and oak. Clay is not a side in an argument; it is a tool with particular properties, and once you know them, every clay wine you meet becomes easier to read.
What clay actually does to wine#
Fired clay is porous. Depending on firing temperature and whether the inside was sealed, it lets a small, steady amount of oxygen through the wall, as a barrel does, but gives the wine nothing to taste. Oak lends vanilla, toast and its own tannin. Clay lends nothing you would name in the glass. What you get is the effect of slow oxygen: tannins that soften and knit, aromatics that move from fresh fruit towards dried fruit, tea and nut, and a texture that feels rounder than steel.
Shape does the second job. Most of these vessels are wider in the belly than at the base, and a fermenting wine sets up gentle convection inside them: warm wine rises through the middle, cooler wine slides down the walls. Skins and seeds move without a hand touching them, then settle into the narrow foot when fermentation stops, and the wine above clears on its own.
Then there is temperature. The earth holds a buried qvevri within a few degrees all year: warm enough for a ferment to start in October, cool enough that it never runs away, cold enough over winter for the wine to settle and stabilise without machinery.
Clay has its risks too. A porous vessel needs scrupulous cleaning or it keeps last year’s microbes, a crack is fatal, and too much oxygen turns a wine flat and brown. It is a demanding material, which is why the traditions that kept it are so codified.
Qvevri: Georgia’s buried egg#
The Georgian qvevri is the vessel with the longest unbroken working life. Pottery from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, south of Tbilisi, carries chemical traces of wine from around 6000 BC; in 2013 UNESCO listed the qvevri method as intangible cultural heritage; and in between, village families never stopped, through kingdoms, empires and the Soviet decades.
A qvevri is egg-shaped, with a narrow foot and a mouth wide enough, on the big ones, for the person who will climb in to clean it. It is built by hand in coils over weeks, fired for days in a wood kiln, then coated inside with melted beeswax while still hot, which closes the larger pores but leaves the clay breathing. Sizes run from a few dozen litres to over three thousand; a working cellar tends to use vessels of one to two thousand. Potters are concentrated in a handful of villages, notably in Imereti, in the west, where the same vessel is called a churi.
The qvevri is buried to the neck in the marani, the wine house, its mouth flush with the floor. Grapes go in crushed but whole, and here the country splits. In Kakheti, in the east, the wine ferments and then sits over winter on the full chacha, the skins, seeds and stems, for five or six months. The result is the deep amber Rkatsiteli and Kisi that most people mean when they say “Georgian wine”: dried apricot, walnut, tea, and a tannin you feel on the gums. In Imereti the winemaker returns only a portion of the skins, and the wines come out paler and fresher. Both are covered with a stone or wooden lid sealed with clay and opened in spring; the empty vessel is scrubbed with a brush of cherry bark and rinsed with lime water.
At Iago Bitarishvili’s cellar in Chardakhi, in Kartli, the same Chinuri goes into two qvevri, one with skins and one without, and comes out as two wines that share little beyond acidity. It is the clearest lesson I know that vessel and skins are separate decisions. In Kakheti you will see both the family marani with three qvevri under a vine trellis and, at an estate like Schuchmann, a hall of them feeding a qvevri line finished in oak. The vessel is the same; the philosophy around it is not.
Karas: Armenia’s jar, revived#
The Armenian karas is older in the record and younger in practice. The Areni-1 cave in Vayots Dzor held a clay treading basin draining into a buried fermentation jar, dated to around 4100 BC, the oldest known complete winery. In the Urartian period, in the first half of the first millennium BC, the fortress storerooms at Karmir Blur, in today’s Yerevan, kept rows of karas sunk into the floor. Xenophon, marching through Armenia around 401 BC, wrote of villages keeping wine in buried jars.
Then the line thinned. Under Soviet planning Armenia became the brandy republic, the Ararat plain went to brandy grapes, and the karas slipped out of the winery. The old jars survived in village yards, where the new estates found them. Zorah, in Rind, bought karas from village families and buried them at the winery; Zorik Gharibian’s Areni Noir ferments in concrete and large oak, then ages in that clay. Voskevaz, near Ashtarak, works a historic karas hall; Trinity Canyon Vineyards in Aghavnadzor ferments and ages its Ancestors line in karas.
Physically a karas is a qvevri’s cousin: a large rounded clay jar, sometimes with a carved band at the shoulder. The practice differs. I have not met a codified Armenian equivalent of the Kakhetian six months on skins; each estate decides for itself how long, how deep, how sealed, because the practice was not handed down in one unbroken line as it was in Georgia. What the karas gives Areni Noir is the slow breathing a qvevri gives Rkatsiteli: the sour cherry and white pepper stay, and a fine grain appears in the tannin that steel never produces.
Amphora: the Mediterranean word#
“Amphora” is the word everyone borrows, and it is the least precise. To a Roman, an amphora was a two-handled transport jar of twenty to forty litres with a pointed base for stacking in a ship’s hold. Wine was fermented and stored in something else: the dolium, a huge round jar buried to the shoulder in the cella vinaria, much like a qvevri. The Etruscans shipped wine in amphorae across the western Mediterranean in the sixth century BC; Spain kept the standing tinaja in La Mancha; the Alentejo in Portugal kept the talha and still makes wine in it under its own legal category. When a modern Italian or French producer says anfora or amphore, they usually mean a standing terracotta jar of several hundred litres, or an imported Georgian qvevri, buried.
The modern chapter starts in Oslavia. In 2000 Joško Gravner went to Georgia; in 2001 he buried eleven qvevri in the Collio and fermented part of his Ribolla Gialla in them. His rule today is four times six: six months on skins in qvevri, six without, six years in large oak, six months in bottle. On the Carso plateau, Vodopivec buries Georgian qvevri for his Vitovska. On Etna, Frank Cornelissen uses terracotta coated inside with epoxy and sunk to the neck in volcanic rock: the shape and thermal mass without the porosity. Terracotta from Impruneta near Florence, ceramic eggs and concrete eggs have all followed, and Dobrá Vinice near Znojmo has buried Georgian qvevri in Moravian soil, still rare there.
How to tell them apart in the glass#
I do not claim to pick the vessel blind every time, but there are tendencies. A full Kakhetian qvevri white announces itself by colour and tannin before you smell it. A karas-aged red keeps its fruit brighter than the same grape from oak and shows no vanilla. An unlined terracotta white can carry a faint chalky note at the finish that a beeswaxed qvevri does not. Lined or coated vessels behave more like steel with a rounder edge.
I ask guests to separate three questions that get tangled together. How long were the skins in contact? That decides colour and tannin, and it is the subject of my article on orange wine. Was the vessel unlined, waxed or coated? That decides oxygen. Was it buried? That decides temperature. Answer those three and you will read a clay wine correctly almost anywhere.
On tour#
On my Kakheti qvevri tour we open a qvevri in a family marani and taste a village cellar and a large estate on the same day, so the vessel stays constant and everything else moves. On the two cradles route we go from the Areni-1 cave to a karas cellar in Rind, then cross into Georgia and put a Kakhetian amber wine beside an Armenian Areni Noir from clay. Nobody has to prefer one. The point is to taste what each vessel and each tradition did with the same idea, and to know, next time you see “amphora” on a list in Brno or Vienna, which of the three you are about to drink.
