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Everything old is new again. The trendiest vessel for aging, and sometimes fermenting, wine is one that has been used since the Neolithic Period, also known as the New Stone Age.

Just one generation ago, amphorae were something winemakers saw in museums, or perhaps on a trip to the country of Georgia. Today, they’re the latest must-have for trendy wineries. But unlike concrete eggs, which seem to have disappeared into a back room somewhere, amphorae have demonstrated staying power.

Amphorae give something to wine that other vessels do not: barrel-like oxygenation without additional tannins from wood. Many winemakers cite purity of expression in saying why they use them.

“For Pinot Noir, the amphora is an absolutely fantastic vessel,” said Chris Hermann, owner and winemaker of 00 Wines in the Willamette Valley. “My goal was a wine with finesse, elegance and very gentle tannins. I was trying to get something that was similar in texture and tannins to Burgundy to represent the purity of Oregon Pinot fruit. That’s why people from Burgundy came here. Their fruit doesn’t have the kind of magical quality our fruit has here.”

Amphorae were practically unknown on the West Coast in 2012, when Manu Fiorentini of Itek, a barrel importer in Paso Robles, decided to commission some in Tuscany. His wife, Jordan, the winemaker at Epoch Estate, was interested in trying an amphora, and Manu is from the area around Siena that is famous for terracotta. He showed a terracotta producer a photo of an amphora from Spain and asked him to make one to his specifications. While making his rounds of Paso producers, he showed what he was working on and discovered several other wineries were interested. He ended up importing a full container of 40 amphorae, all pre-sold.

At the time, Manu had no real competition. He does now. Major barrel importer Bouchard jumped headlong into the amphora market in 2015 and now sells what Paolo Bouchard calls “technical amphorae” from three different Italian producers.

“The amphora game, 15 years ago, was in a very raw state,” Bouchard told Grape & Wine Magazine. “I don’t think people really knew what they were making. The people making very technical amphorae now do. These amphorae are cooked at constant temperatures. There’s a lot of reproducibility.”

While most amphorae in the U.S. today come from Italy, one man in Oregon, Andrew Beckham, has developed his own method of producing them. But Beckham mostly uses them for his own wine at Beckham Estate Vineyard, though he has sold a few to wineries in New Zealand and France as well as to a whiskey producer in Mexico.

The Traditional Method
In Tuscany, terracotta amphorae are made much as they were millennia ago. The technique is called “colombino.” An artisan builds up the clay layer by layer from the outside. These amphorae are not spun, and there is no mold. When finished, they are fired in a kiln. They are truly handmade products.

The type of clay, called galestro, is important; it is best known from the town of Impruneta but can come from other parts of Tuscany. The tiles that cover the duomo in Florence are made of galestro.

“It has a specific composition of sand, clay, water and minerals,” Fiorentini said. “It is world-renowned for its characteristic of being freeze-resistant. It was used for statues, and some of those statues have been standing for hundreds of years.”

Another Tuscan company, Manetti Gusmano & Figli, also uses this method.

“Since the Middle Ages they started to make terracotta using this specific clay,” Federico Manetti told Grape & Wine Magazine. “There is a field behind me. If you make terracotta by processing this clay, you don’t have to use any additives. You come up with the most dense, the most noble, the most durable terracotta in the world.

Manetti said only about 20 people in the world currently have mastered the traditional technique, which limits production scalability. His company makes only 120 amphorae per year, between 400 and 800 liters each. He said about 15% go to the U.S., mostly to Napa Valley.

“Most amphora producers use chalk molds right now. That can speed up the process a lot,” Manetti said. “We go round and round, and every day we attach one piece of clay. The amphora stands still and every day we attach 5 centimeters. It takes two months to finish it. And then one week for drying, for the humidity. One week for the firing process, going up to 1,000 degrees C. Then we fill the amphoras up with water. We wait two weeks. Then we are ready to package the amphora to prepare for the shipment.

“Ours are a bit more expensive, but I think not expensive enough,” Manetti said.

The Ancient Vessel Made Faster
The colombino method is artisanal, but as Bouchard said, not necessarily reproducible. In 2013, a company called Tava in Trentino in northern Italy began making amphora by placing clay in a mold and firing it at extremely high temperatures of 2,192 to 2,300 degrees F.

Bouchard said the oxygen transfer rate can be controlled by the temperature at which the amphorae are fired. Tava claims its standard porosity is 5%, similar to an oak barrel, but wineries can request an amphora that is either more or less porous. Tava also offers amphorae made from a porcelain-like material called grés Monolite that it says has 2.5% porosity.

This is a bit counterintuitive. I talked to several wineries that use terracotta amphorae, which should be less predictable, to make 100% amphora wines without blending with wine from other vessels. In contrast, Bouchard said most wineries use the more standardized Tava amphorae as a component in finished wines.

“They use the amphorae for 20% or 30% to have freshness and complexity, and they mix it with other vessels,” Bouchard said. “This is something we see in the Rhone and in Bordeaux. We’re seeing it in these red-wine areas that are having to change to make the type of wine consumers are looking for, something a little fresher. Wines that are 100% amphorae can be a little mono-dimensional. A little boring. It’s like if you only make a wine in stainless steel. The wines that are best, they use it as a component.”

Indeed, Varinder Sahi, owner and winemaker of Copia Vineyards and Winery in Paso Robles, said, “I ferment and age our white wines and rosé in all three mediums: oak barrels, stainless steel and amphorae. I believe it creates different layers of mouthfeel as the rate of micro-oxygenation is different in all three mediums.”

A New Method in Oregon
Beckham was a ceramicist before becoming a winemaker. He said he developed his own method of creating amphorae that involves spinning the clay, as in other forms of pottery.
“They’re spun using a method I’ve developed that gives me increased mechanical advantage,” Beckham told. “I developed this method so that they’re seamless, which is unusual. We have in our cellar 110 amphorae for wine production. We’re producing 4,000 cases each year for the estate. We’ve shifted all our production, with the exception of two Pinot Noir cuvées, to a clay vessel.”

Beckham said he went through six iterations of his method, working with materials scientists and chemists, to get the oxygen transfer rate where he wants it.

“We are micro-oxygenating the wine at the same rate as a barrel,” Beckham said. “It’s one thing to make a ceramic vessel that will hold liquid. It’s another thing to work through the steps of the engineering and the chemistry to get the winemaking right. Our vessels are very informed as the winemaker is the potter. The potter has been listening to the winemaker.

“All this leads to is a vessel that provides neutrality and purity,” he said. “That provides texture and mouthfeel, but without adding flavor. It can really showcase the place, the effort we put into farming our fruit. To me, our wines have a unique texture. They have a dusty, chalky, mineral-driven mouthfeel that is not about integrating something into the wine that was never part of its inception, but are about showcasing the place. A barrel is going to impart sweetness and smokiness and notes that were never part of the grape.”

The Downsides
There are three main downsides to amphorae:
• They are heavy and can break when moved.
• They can be difficult to clean.
• Even the largest amphora cannot contain as much wine as a steel tank.

“They’re hard to move around,” said 00 Wines’ Hermann. “If you try to move them by themselves, they’ll break. We put them in half-ton bins. We’ll use the forklift to move them around. Sometimes we’ve had harvest interns make mistakes and they’ll break. The good news is insurance carriers will pay for new ones. You also have to be careful how you clean them.”

Jared Etzel, owner and winemaker of Rodeo Hills in the Willamette Valley, said he bought some amphorae but stopped using them mainly because he was concerned about contamination.

“The main thing for me was what’s the benefit of using amphorae?” Etzel said. “There is a benefit when it’s done right and they’re brand new. I actually quite like them when the risk isn’t there. I like the more open profile and the mineral element you can get with amphorae. But not at the cost of potentially having Brettanomyces.

“The other issue is from a volume basis standpoint,” Etzel said. “I want to have enough fermenters to fill from a desired block. Most of my blocks are 1 to 2 acres. You’d be looking at a lot of amphorae to fill those. The practicality of it; it didn’t make sense to me.”

As with everything in winemaking, every winemaker has a different experience.

“The fruit and the floral notes are more alive,” said Alessandro Meniconi, winemaker for Valdangius in Spoleto, Italy.

Hermann, who acknowledges the difficulty of using them, says in the end, the results justify the effort.

“I travel around the world showing my wine to high-end sommeliers. They’re very excited about my wines,” Hermann said. “All of our single-vineyard wines go into amphorae. We use just the 500-liter clay amphorae, and we do single-berry fermentation inside the clay amphorae. There is not another wine on the market like it.”