Clay is Mother by Isobel Salamon

Clay is the beginning.

Before barrels. Before bottles. Clay made fermentation possible. It allowed grapes to become wine — to travel and endure. This wasn’t about tradition or symbolism; it was infrastructure.

Wine does not exist without its container. If the first container was clay, wine owes it almost everything.

For wine, clay is mother.

Smaller amphorae in Pompeii, Italy

THE GEORGIA CONNECTION

Archaeological evidence traces Qvevri winemaking back to around 6000 BCE in Georgia. These large, terracotta, egg-shaped vessels are built by hand and buried in the earth. They hold grapes with their skins, seeds, and often stems — known locally as the mother, or chacha — to ferment at the steady temperature of the earth.

While underground, the Qvevri regulates, protects, and preserves the juice. It allows the character of the grape to develop without the added flavours of oak or the sterility of steel. This is stripped-back winemaking: no chemicals, no control panels — simply the story of the vintage and the grape. Today, it is a UNESCO-protected method.

Travelling to Georgia and standing beside an unburied Qvevri is disarming. Above ground, they are vast, muscular forms. Encountering them — in the open air or the cellar — awakened a hunger in me for process, for continuity, for honouring history through practice. Seeing them helped me understand what potters mean when they say clay has a memory.

This phrase isn’t poetic invention — it’s physics. Clay, when shaped and stressed, holds the energy of its making. When fired, that memory becomes permanent. Fill it with wine, and it begins to remember that too.

Mateja Gravner with her clay amphorae

Clay demands patience. Vessels crack if moisture shifts or firing runs too hot. They leak, warp, and sometimes collapse. Truly, they resist control. So why work with them. Because when they work, they offer something no other material can. Clay breathes. Its micro-porosity allows a slow, steady exchange of oxygen. It softens tannins, stabilises colour, and lets wine clarify naturally. The vessel adds no aroma of its own — only this indescribable texture.

Interestingly, ancient Georgian winemakers were also some of the first potters, conceiving wine alongside its vessel out of necessity. Building a Qvevri is no small feat. Makers still dig local clay, roll it into long coils, and construct the vessels slowly, layer upon layer — a process I like to describe as making clay sausages. Repetitive and physical, demanding patience, it mirrors the rhythm of the wine itself.

It’s hardly surprising that fewer people are entering the profession. A single Qvevri can take months to construct, and many more to dry before being fired in a handmade kiln that burns for days. Potters read the fire by colour and smell, and when the firing is done, the kiln is dismantled piece by piece, leaving the vessel to cool like a newborn. Modern winemaking often prizes precision and data. Clay rewards instinct. With amphora, there is little room for ego, and the best wines taste not of intervention but of surrender — to the process, the place, and the fruit.

CLAY EVOLVING

From Georgia, clay vessels spread across the ancient world, carried along trade routes into Armenia, Greece, Rome, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. Taking on different names and forms as they travelled, these vessels moved wine across seas and borders, allowing it to be stored, stabilised, and exchanged.

While animal skins may have been used for short-term transport, clay represents the earliest known specialised container designed for intentional, large-scale winemaking and storage. It was durable, reusable, and scalable — setting the terms for wine long before wood became dominant and before glass framed clarity. It was not a precursor waiting to be replaced, but a solution that worked. Crucially, clay made wine

possible en masse — allowing it to circulate, and in doing so, to shape culture across regions.

By the medieval period, it fell out of favour. Wood took over: lighter to move, easier to repair, better suited to expanding trade. Oak barrels reshaped wine’s flavour profile forever; their gentle oxidation, woody imprint, and tannic structure became the new norm. The industrial centuries brought cement, then stainless steel, with a focus on hygiene, durability, and control. By comparison, clay looked erratic. It was even deemed old-fashioned.

Across the Mediterranean, clay never disappeared entirely — it evolved with the cultures that kept it alive. In Georgia, Qvevri remain buried. In Armenia, clay pots have the same prehistory as Georgia, part of an ancient winemaking continuum. In Italy, anfore more often sit above ground, forming part of the cellar rather than the landscape, used for fermentation, ageing, or both. Spain’s tinajas tell another story: they are smaller and more portable, shaped by Roman and Moorish influence, once workhorses in regions like La Mancha and Andalucía. In Greece, the lineage is carried by the two- handled pithoi: designed for movement, trade, and the sea, as much a container as a cultural symbol.

The forms may change, but across regions and centuries, the principles endure.

THE REVIVAL

In the modern wine world, the amphora revival is often traced back to Joško Gravner in Friuli. Intrigued by alternative winemaking, Gravner travelled to Georgia in 2000 to bring back qvevri, which he later buried in his Oslavia vineyards. What he created was not imitation but conversation — between Caucasus and Collio, prehistory and modernity. A seismic moment where ancient practice collided with contemporary intent. Others followed: Foradori in Trentino, COS in Sicily.

Clay was not adopted as fashion, but as philosophy.It is striking how often the mother remains unnamed. Ask sommeliers about amphora or amber wine, and many will cite Gravner or Foradori. Fewer can name multiple Georgian producers. This is changing — slowly. Even supermarkets now list Qvevri wines from Georgia, offering small signs that recognition is catching up with origin.

Clay has become a tool for expression again — not nostalgia, but experimentation. Amphora’s role in the winery has shifted, offering producers new ways to work with clay across fermentation and ageing. Some favour long underground macerations, others brief skin contact; some ferment above ground, others age exclusively in clay, and some move wine between vessels. The result is not uniformity, but a spectrum of contemporary expressions — precise, exploratory, all rooted in the same ancient material.

A PERSONAL RETURN

When I founded CLAY, my amphora wine fair, it came from a belief that the vessel tells one of the

truest stories of wine. Amphora is not nostalgia or trend. It is continuity — a bridge between old

and new, east and west, memory and practice.

Growing up in the hills of Western Australia, amphorae were part of my environment. Terracotta

pots lined driveways and kitchens, holding plants, olive oil, and dry goods. Italian migration shaped

my community — echoes of Europe transplanted into the bushland. These vessels created a familiarity with clay that predated my understanding of wine.

Amphora isn’t just history — it’s in my DNA.

When I see a Qvevri buried underground, an Italian anfora resting in a cellar, or a Spanish tinaja

stained by decades of harvest, I see the same impulse repeating across millennia: human hands

holding the earth just long enough to let it ferment.

Clay is mother — everything else is lineage.

MOTHERS, DESCENDANTS, NEW BLOOD

A personal map, not a manifesto. These are wines that show clay’s lineage in motion — from the originators to modern interpretation.

Mothers - Where the method is origin, UNESCO-protected Qvevri winemaking

• Pheasant’s Tears — Rkatsiteli, Kakheti, Georgia

One of the pillars of Georgia’s amber wine tradition. Dried apricot, gentle tannins, mineral depth.

• Iago Bitarishvili — Chinuri, Kartli, Georgia

Iago Bitarishvili in his cellar

An amber wine noted for its clarity and vibrancy, and a key figure in the revitalisation of Qvevri winemaking. Floral, saline, energetic. • Alaverdi Monastery — Kisi, Kakheti, Georgia

A standout amber wine; the monastery was central to the renaissance of Georgian Qvevri winemaking. Honeyed, textured, persistent, showing restrained extraction.

• Baia’s Wine — Tsitska–Tsolikouri–Krakhuna, Imereti, Georgia

Reflecting Imereti’s western style and continuity of practice. Aromatic, nutty, subtly

textured, with refreshing acidity.

Descendants - Conversation, not imitation

• Joško Gravner — Ribolla Gialla, Friuli

Georgian qvevri transplanted to Collio, sparking a modern reckoning; long skin contact,

buried in vineyard soil.

• Foradori — Nosiola ‘Fontanasanta’, Trentino

Spanish tinajas used to ferment Nosiola grapes with skins for 8–15 months; a complex

orange wine with a long, savoury finish.

• COS — Pithos Rosso, Vittoria, Sicily

Volcanic, textural, precise; fermented in amphora. Sicilian Rosso brimming with character and clarity.

New Blood

Clay as tool, not shrine

• Bodega Juan Carlos Sancha — Peña El Gato, Rioja (Tinaja, Viñas Centenarias)

Long fermentation and ageing in traditional tinajas within historic vines, imparting a silky complexity; clay as a working vessel.

• Voskevaz — Voskehat ‘Karasi Collection’ 2016, Armenia

Old vines from Armenia’s oldest winery. Fermented and aged in karas; reaffirming Armenia’s place in the Caucasian origins of clay winemaking.

• Domaine de la Sorbière — Brouilly en Jarre 2018/19/20, Beaujolais

Minimal intervention Gamay from old vines. Fermented and aged in various-sized clay vessels, giving vibrant character and structure.

• Brash Higgins — Zibibbo, McLaren Vale

Fermented and aged in amphora to preserve aromatic clarity and texture rather than impart flavour; showing clay’s intimate, guiding role.

• Enrico Rivetto — Lirano Nebbiolo, Piemonte

Long fermentation and ageing in amphora using local Lirano clay 50 metres below the

vines; a pure expression of Nebbiolo fruit.

• De Bortoli — ‘Phi’ Freeman’s Bridge Grenache Amphora 2022

Amphora fermentation; clay explored as an unoaked influence, allowing the pure expression

of fruit to shine.