Amphora / Qvevri

What They Are

Amphora is the broad term for a clay or terracotta vessel used in winemaking — a category that encompasses the Georgian qvevri, the Portuguese talha, the Spanish tinaja, the Italian anfora, and the Armenian karas. What they share: an earthenware body, varying degrees of porosity, and an absence of the flavoring compounds that define oak. The qvevri is the most historically significant of the group — egg-shaped, typically lined with beeswax, and designed to be buried upright in the earth so that only the neck remains above ground. Volumes range widely, from a few hundred liters to several thousand.

Why Winemakers Use Them

Clay is micro-porous. Oxygen passes through the walls at a rate roughly comparable to a well-used oak barrel — slow enough to encourage gentle polymerization without the accelerating influence of new wood. Unlike oak, clay contributes no tannin, no vanilla, no toast. The vessel is neutral in flavor while remaining active in physics. Burial in the earth provides something no temperature-controlled cellar can fully replicate: the thermal mass of the ground itself, which holds at roughly 14–15°C year-round and absorbs the heat of active fermentation without mechanical intervention. The result is a stable, unhurried environment that rewards grape character over winemaking artifice.

The Georgian Tradition

Archaeological evidence places qvevri use in Georgia as far back as 6000 BC — making it among the oldest confirmed winemaking traditions on earth. The classic Georgian method involves fermenting whole clusters or crushed grapes — skins, seeds, and stems included — directly in the buried qvevri. Extended skin contact, sometimes running six months or more, produces the deep amber wines that have become shorthand for the style internationally. In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the ancient Georgian traditional qvevri wine-making method on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing it not merely as a technique but as a living cultural practice — one transmitted through families and communities, tied to harvest rituals and oral tradition.

The Modern Revival

The contemporary return to amphora winemaking traces most directly to Friuli, where Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon began experimenting with qvevri and skin-contact whites in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their work was polarizing at the time; it now reads as foundational. From there, the practice spread — to Tuscany, to the Jura, to Portugal's Alentejo, where talha winemaking had never entirely disappeared. Today producers in California, Oregon, South Africa, and elsewhere work with clay. The vessel's appeal is not nostalgia but precision: for winemakers who want to remove variables rather than add them, clay is a logical tool.

In Our Work

Champagne Augustin — Marc Augustin, farming nine and a half Premier Cru hectares in Avenay-Val-d'Or — is the most striking example we carry of amphora's reach into unexpected territory. His Terre cuvée ferments and ages in a Georgian clay qvevri that rests in dirt on the cellar floor — not a gesture toward Georgia, but a deliberate choice about what that particular vessel does to that particular wine. The earthen contact grounds the wine in a mineral register that is impossible to achieve in steel or wood. Marc's broader philosophy — biodynamics taken to its most rigorous expression, including peppering and quartz crystal placements — finds its most material expression in that buried clay. It is, as far as we know, one of the only qvevri in active use in Champagne.