After seven years, Amphora Day 2024, held at Rocim’s spectacular winery in Alentejo, has become a fixture in the International wine calendar exclusively devoted to clay pot winemaking. While the focus is on the newly tapped talha wine from the local villages, it is also a great opportunity to retaste older talha wines to see how they are developing. It has also become THE place for an increasing number of International producers to show off their amphora-made wine. There is simply no other place on earth where it’s possible to taste some of the planet’s newest wine styles and then spend the evening ‘adega’ crawling in the surrounding villages like people did in Roman times.

2024 is looking to be a superb year for talha wine. Where previous years in Alentejo have been increasingly hot and dry, 2024 delivered a lot of rain and a cooler, longer growing season resulting in higher acidity, lower alcohol and increased complexity across the board. 

Here are a few of my favourite 2024 talha wines: 

During Amphora Day festivities Rocim tapped 1500 litre talhas, sharing the latest harvest with a thousand eager participants crowding around the pots with outstretched glasses. Both the red and whites were remarkably finished wines with the white especially polished and silky this year. Rocim’s many talha-made wines build up from this classic baseline. All are faithful examples and, given their global distribution, provide an excellent entry point to understanding talha wines. 

Similarly impressive are Adega Cooperativa de Vidigueira, Cuba e Alvito’s 2024s.  Old vine Aragones, Trincadeira, and Tinta Grossa from Vila de Frades is fermented in a talha dated 1656 to produce Adega Vidigueira 1656 Tinto 2024. Tons of spicy fruit and great acidity this year, a bit like biting into fresh blackberries and crunching the seeds. (92) Vidigueira Centenaria Branco 2024 comprises a white field blend of 130-year-old Vidigueira vines. A mix of tinned pear, beeswax and pine needle aromas (perhaps from freshly pes-coated talha), that offers up a pleasing roll-around-your-tongue density, long flavours and then fine acidity and skin tannins. (94) Both are very traditional styles this year, each showing power, density and vibrant acidity.

Canena Vinhas Velhas Tinto 2024 Talha DOC is packed with big, crunchily fresh, blackberry brambly characters, bolstered by dusty, then powdery tannins driving length. Hard to believe such a pure wine can be so drinkable just a few months after birth. Good from the start, this wine becomes even better with age. First tasted seven years ago, the 2018 version has evolved into something quite refined, promising many more years. (89)  

Some favourite Portuguese talha-made wines with a bit of age include:

Vila Alva’s XXVI Talhas have an increasingly impressive trackrecord of talha-specific bottlings. Their XXVI Talhas Talha X Branco 2023 11.5% contains a field blend of eleven varieties, nicely harmonizing into delicate spice floral aromas. Surprisingly sweetly fruited (although bone dry) with ultra-ripe, fine skin tannins flowing through a long, tapered finish. (90) XXVI Talhas Mestre Daniel Tinto 2022 co-ferments Tinta Grossa, Moreto and Aragones on skins for six months. It radiates all kinds of cherry characters, delivering tremendous back palate concentration without thickness. (94)  Nicely counterpointing this with pure Tinta Grossa, XXVI Talhas Talha XV 2022 is chock full of spicy clove and cherry characters flowing through a concentrated slick texture, finishing off with silk-edged acidity and fine tannins. Very long. (96) 

Legendary Alentejo winemaker David Baverstock retired from Esperão a few years back and established Howards Folly as a ‘talha taberna’ in Estremoz. Howards Folly Tres Anforas Tinto 2021 12.5% and Branco 2021 12% Vinho de Talha DOCs are crackers. Both made from eighty-five-year-old vineyards. The tinto packs in amazing cherryesque fruit depth. Dense, taught and velvety in the mouth - real iron fist in a velvet glove stuff - it delivers tremendous flavour length and should last for decades. (96)  The branco is as refined as it is characterful. (89)

Geracoes da Talha Farappo Branco 2023 12.5% Vinho de Talha DOC wears the spicy, honeyed beeswax and lemon aromas (fresh pes internal beeswax coating?) over a baseline of pears, quince and apple skins. It’s plush and rounded in the mouth and juicy throughout. (94)

There were too many other interesting wines to cover here. A few worth watching out for are: Honrado Vinum Novum Tinto 2023 12.8% (90), Sovibor Mamore da Talha Petroleiro 2022 (88), Talha Mafia Branco 2024 (88), Canano Tinto Vinhas Velhas 2023 (92) and so many others… Montalto, Scylla, Quinta da Alorna, Barroca da Malhada, Arvad, Serenada, Quinta do Paral, Adega Marel, Raul Moreno, Encosta do Pinhal.

Standout international styles in 2024 included:

Napa Valley organic producer Tres Sabores Winery planted St Laurent back in 2014. Winemaker Jon Engelskirger was angling for something ‘soulful…between 11 and 12% alcohol’ eventually settled it into Beckham’s Oregon-produced, dolium-inspired, Novum amphoras in 2019. He loved ‘the intersection between low alcohol, low tannin, highly complex anthocyanin, significant pyrazines, fruit and clay’ and how all that sediments out with ‘still live organisms’ in the belly of an amphora. He’d ‘heard others speak of constant batonnage by way of that curvaceous shape,’ wondering, ‘Why won’t this settle?’, then self-answering, ‘Ah, texture - love that!’

All of which plays into Tres Sabores Winery’s St Laurent 2023 11%. Bursting with herbal/basal/balsamic spiciness amplifying mulberry characters infusing a big, soft, fleshy texture and tempered with just enough acidity to keep it all in check. (90) Tres Sabores Winery St Laurent 2022 is spicier and broader still, more savoury, more depth and juicier finish. (91)

Stellenbosch’s Kleine Zalze have been working 50-year-old vine Chenin Blanc in amphora since 2016. The wine is fermented on skins for seven days then removed, with the free-run juice returned to amphora for nine months, then bottled. Kleine Zalze 2024 is full of sappy, nicely balanced acidity and well-integrated skin tannins, both counterpointing a full dense texture with tons of Cheninesque honey & lemon buried inside. (90)

Unusual for Georgia, Kakheti’s Tilisma Winery has a young woman winemaker, Ketevan Hubert. Focused on low intervention, organics and non-sulphite wines, her qvevri wines favour less skin contact, so are fresher and fruitier than the norm. Tilisma’s white blend of Kisi and, nearly extinct, Khikhvi from 2023 was left on skins for eight hours inside qvevri, then removed with the free-run juice returned, resulting in a rounder fatter, fleshier style, with spicy fruits, racy acidity and fine tannins. (89) Not unlike Portugal’s traditional Palhete mix of red and white grapes, Tilisma Saperavi-Mtsvani-Rkatsiteli ‘dark rose’ Qvevri 2022 was more linear offering an intriguing mix of dried and fresh strawberries. (89) 

Another winery bucking Georgia’s traditional 6-8 month on-skin ferments is Tezi Winery from Kartli. Tezi Tsolikauri 2022 had skins in qvevri for just a day, delivering super fresh quince fruit, a not too firm, cohesive texture, finishing with pearish minerality. (87). Kisi 2023 stretched skin contact to 21 days creating spicier notes, with quince/peach pit fruits throughout. (88). Mtzvane 2022 with 30 days on skin, created a densely concentrated, expansively powerful style laden with complex, herbal dried apricot characters. (94)

Piemonte’s Rocco di Carpeneto uses above ground dolia by Artenova, who originally revived this ancient Roman design. The winemaker loves the interplay of clay with skin contact derived high acidity and tannins. Rocco di Carpeneto AdMura 2020 12% presses 100% Albarossa grapes after fermentation then returns the wine for another 18 months in amphora. Brimming with super-ripe black fruits and liquorice, it’s velvety in the mouth with fine tannins and acidity cutting through. (89)  RataRaura 2022 13%, following a similar regime, offers up funky, savoury black fruit notes and a long, elegant, silky finish. (90)

Looking back on this year’s Amphora Day I had a lightbulb moment. The day before I had my fourth opportunity to taste Hedade do Rocim’s Jupiter 2015, which had been aged in talha for four years and subsequently became the most famous, most expensive clay pot produced wine in the world. When released it was an impressively complete wine right off the starters block. And yet no one could know how it would evolve or for how long. 

I’d recently tasted a couple of Rocim’s more conventionally made Vinha da Micaela wines that shared the same old vine source. These were more linear, showing positive Alicante Bouchet’s fine grained, extended tannic characters. Restasting Jupiter on its ninth birthday it seems to have traded expansive power and flamboyance for grace and elegance, showing the depth and complexity of its fruit source. Having tasted many talha wines from the 1940s and 50s, I reckon this wine is destined to live as long, continuing to dazzle taste buds along the way. 

A final observation this year, I noticed a subtle, but steady growth of ‘talha tourism’. The local villages are increasingly widening the talha experience beyond St Martin’s Day and Amphora Day. New talha tavernas Adega Museu do Vinho de Talha (Canena/Pigarça), Geracoes, and Adego do Arcos have joined stalwarts, Adega-Museu Cella Vinaria Antiqua (Honrado), XXVI Talhas and Howard’s Folly in providing extended talha tourist experiences, broadening the opportunity to explore the mystique of this very special winemaking tradition.

Alentejo’s annual Amphora Day offers a snapshot of both the current state of claypot winemaking globally, but also the ongoing resurgence of local talha claypot wine production.

Since 2018, the event has been held within Herdade do Rocim’s ultra-modern, eco-friendly winery. Fittingly, Rocim is surrounded by Portugal’s most traditional talha pot winemaking villages. There, in Vidigueira, Vila Alva, Vila de Frades, and Cuba, the last vestiges of Roman (probably Phoenician) claypot winemaking tradition remains unbroken since antiquity.

This year the event coincided with traditional St-Martin’s Day celebrations (November 11). This important day marks when Vinho de Talha DOC certification begins and the new season’s wine is drained from the bottom of talhas and served directly to tables filled with thirsty villagers in local adegas, tabernas, and restaurants. 

The event hosted 60 exhibitors from as far afield as South Africa, Italy, France, Spain and Georgia, fleshed out by 34 Portuguese talha wine producers. Sadly, no Americans, Australians, or war-weary Armenians attended this year. Nevertheless, a full gamut of claypot wine styles were available to taste.

Three stylistic categories of amphora wine

Generally, wines slotted into three stylistic categories, revolving around length of grape skin contact and time kept under terracotta’s influence. Extending skin contact increasingly unlocks flavors and tannic structure from skins. This, in turn, is buffered by controlled oxidation coming through pot walls, resulting in softer, longer, more integrated, polymerized tannins. These often go hand in hand with enhanced grape purity and intensified varietal characters.

Georgian qvevri practices traditionally favor around 6 months of skin contact, resulting in fuller, denser, more tannic, “orange”-colored wines.

In contrast, Alentejo’s Vinho de Talha DOC rules require around three months’ contact, resulting in lighter colors and textures with fresher aromas and acidity—friendlier to modern tastebuds.

The broader undefined “amphora” category is more freeform. It can range between no skin contact, up to the most extreme lengths of contact. Another focus is on time spent fermenting and/or maturing in pots as an alternative to barrique conditioning. This “anything goes” approach can result in entirely new, groundbreaking wine styles.

All of these were brilliantly on display at this year’s Amphora Day.

Georgia’s large delegation of 11 qvevri producers offered its widest range of styles so far. Although generally showing firmer tannic structures, denser textures, and darker colors, differing grape varieties and climates were more at play this time, breaking stereotypes.

Georgia’s cooler, more westerly regional climates often employ less skin contact, creating lighter, brighter, and crisper styles than those from hotter eastern regions. Winery Khareba Monestery Qvevri Wine Tsitska 2019 11.5% was a good example of lighter, finer styles versus fuller, firmer Meskhisvilli Family Winery 2020 13.5%, a Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, and Kisi co-ferment.

Meskhisvilli’s winemaker offered an interesting take on talha wine. He felt grapes were picked too unripe and wines drunk when too fresh, and preferred Georgia’s ultra-ripe, long skin-contact styles, designed for longer-term bottle aging.

Talha wines: Growing by leaps and bounds

Meanwhile, Alentejo’s talha wines are clearly growing by leaps and bounds in terms of quality and production. Overall, increased familiarity is driving a more effective use of talha in light of fruit, seasonal change, and vineyard terroir. A major generational turnover to younger, more professionally trained enologists and viticulturalists is bringing greater consistency, complexity, and refinement, alongside a marked reduction in rusticity. Geracoes, Honrado, and Quinta da Pigarca all follow this trend. Thankfully, positively charming rusticity can still be found in village wines served directly from pots. 

Stalwart talha wine producers continue to crank out gold and silver medal-level, authentic Vinho de Talha DOC. Esporao’s old-vine, own-rooted Moreto and Rupeiro consistently overdeliver. So too Rui Reguinga’s high-altitude, old-vine, field-blended Terranus Tinto and Branco. XXVI Talhas remain solidly made, expressive, and interesting across a broad range of talha specific bottlings. Vidigueira Cooperative’s Branco, made from 120+ year-old field blends, remains a stellar bargain.

Standard bearer Herdade do Rocim’s excellent range of talha-made wines are widely available in 20+ countries, offering consumers an easy entry point to this ancient technology. All shine with a style that has steadily evolved towards more precision, polish, and refined elegance. Their ubiquitous Fresh from Amphora is great value: light, fresh, invitingly aromatic, and crisply made. Rocim’s Vinho de Talha DOCs are faithful to the form, albeit better integrated and more finely viscous than most. From the reserve range, Bojador gets close to Burgundian transparency and Clay Aged is fuller and richer than most anything barrique-made, but without the added oaky characters.

Sovibor, working 85 talha in cool Borba climates since 1968, offered up a silky smooth, long-finishing Mamore Amphora 2019 13.5% 18.5/20. Nearly as persistent, Mamore 100% Moreto 2018 is fresher, spicier, and juicier than more southern grown Moreto. 17.5/20

Estremoz’s Howard’s Folly Tres Anforas Branco 2022 12.3% consciously employed a 1-2mm protective coating offlor specifically to increase reduction. Initial flor nuttiness quickly dissipates into fresh, citrusy, florals. Ultra-clean and tightly focused, this gastronomic style has plenty of plucky acidity. 16/20

Relative newcomers Talha Mafia follow XXVI Talha’s lead with individual talha bottlings, Revolver the best of the lot. Lisbon’s urban winery, Adega Belim, create a compelling dry Setubal Muscat.

This year Canano, Adega do Teso, and Quinta do Panhal popped up almost out of nowhere, from the previously unknown northern talha village of Cabeção, where 50 producers with 500 historic talha continue to make Roman-era wine styles. Who knew?

Amphora wine beyond Alentejo

Outside of Alentejo, newish Algarve producer Arvad takes its name from a nearby river the Phoenicians once rowed up, trading for native Tartessian wine. Their unique 11% talha-made Negra Mole Branco 2023 is unexpectedly full of pear, passionfruit, and pineapple fruit and florals, sappy acidity and fleshy textures. 16/20

Well beyond Portugal, South Africa’s Lokaia (Franschhoek region) lean towards a Vinho de Talha DOC formula with 2 months of skin contact and preservation under an olive oil film. Super-clean Lokaia Semillon 2022 (10.5%) is brightly lit and linear, tightly packed with lemony, beeswax varietal characters throughout. 16/20

Bordeaux’s Château de Piote temper their 2018 Malbec in amphora for a year. Counter-intuitively, they find their Malbec is always fresher and finer-tannined than in less oxidative barrique. I found Malbec’s mid-palate, dusty tannins, considerably finer and lengthened well into the finish. 16.5/20 Reversing direction, inky black Château Couronneau Maceration de Couronneau 2020 15%, extracts every last drop of color and tannins from skins, using amphora to pull back excessive chunkiness into something drinkable. Intensely Merlot, it begs for more bottle age. 16.5/20

From both his name and the origins of his wine, I hadn‘t expected Daniel Ramos to be Australian. Ramos works high-altitude, old-vine, Castilian Garnacha in Spanish tinajas. Kept on skins for 11 months and drained via a talha-like lower hole into bottle, his red and rosé were intriguingly edgy, difficult to describe, and worth experiencing.

Just across from Portugal’s talha country, Estramadura’s first organic producer continues to use talha-like, holed pots. Prelvin lines these with beeswax pes, refreshed every three years. This influence is evident in their 2021 Alicante Bouchet, with the spicy, fresh black fruits positively tinged with beeswax aromas, even more so in the mouth. 16/20

Amphora Day never fails to surprise for its depth of diversity and ability to pull in so many of the world’s leading clay-pot winemakers. Nowhere else in the wine world provides such a magnificent juxtaposition between old and new.

The best way to enhance that experience is to wander around the talha tabernas during festivities in the surrounding villages on the nights before and after Amphora Day.

This is truly one of wine tourism’s greatest hidden gems.

St Martins Day (November 11) marks the official first tasting of current vintage wines from Alentejo’s talha clay pots. Traditionally, villagers moved from house to house and between small tabernas or adegas (wineries) sharing food, tasting each other’s wines, and celebrating the fresh vintage, predating Beaujolais Nouveau Day by centuries.

A decade ago this ancient tradition faced extinction, with less than 1,000 bottles produced. Happily, in 2021, close to 200,000 bottles will be produced by at least 15 professional winemakers and many more amateurs.

The story behind Amphora Day

A little background is in order. The modern amphora movement was centered within northern Italy in the 2000s, and looked to Georgia for lessons and answers, not knowing of Alentejo’s unbroken Roman clay pot tradition. Eventually, Tuscany’s Terracotta Wine 2014 produced the first exclusively focused clay-made wine fair. I introduced the Portuguese to the Northern Europeans, Armenians, and Georgians at Terracotta Wine 2016 and since then they’ve been as thick as thieves.

Inspired by this, in 2018 Herdade do Rocim developed Amphora Day in Alentejo, as an annual event centered within local St. Martin’s Day talha celebrations, counterpointing the biennial Terracotta Wine (next Terracotta Wine is June 4 and 5, 2022). Both have grown into forums for sharing and showcasing evolving clay pot wine styles, complementing, rather than competing with one another.

The initial 2018 event drew 20 exhibitors, entrants doubled in 2019, then skipped a beat in 2020 due to Covid. This year’s Amphora Day had more than 60 entrants showing their potted wines from all quarters of the world: France, Georgia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, USA, and, of course, Alentejo. Unfortunately, dastardly Covid forced several Armenian, Australian, Georgian, and South African entrants to postpone until next year.

Clay in every which way

More than 1,000 punters paid €10 for a Riedel glass and all the clay made wine they fancied. Local food and wandering musicians performing Alentejan folk tunes enhanced the merry atmosphere. The apex of the day was the tapping of Rocim’s talha for a first taste of their 2021 white and red, with the new vintage piped in by a traditionally clad all male choir, arms locked and swaying as they sang.

Wine styles ranged from the very ancient to the modern-most extremes of where the world has been pushing clay pot technology.

Several Georgians offered their buried pot Qvevri wines, kept on skins for eight months, providing a distinctive contrast to above-ground Talha wines with their shorter two-month skin contact. Alentejo wines were divided between the experimentalists and the traditionalists produced under stricter Vinho de Talha DOC rules. The latter, kept on skins in talha until at least St Martin’s Day, are only certified at time of skin separation. A dozen adegas showed “classical” DOC styles with a surprising range of characteristics.

Pushing the boundaries from within the DOC tradition, Rocim and Quinta da Pigarca have aged their wine in barrel-sized clay pots, and both Rocim and Jose de Sousa have successfully explored multi-year aging in talha. No mean feat given talha’s wide neck and permeable clay walls and how tricky it can be staving off oxidation.

Outsider innovations included Susana Esteban’s flor and talha hybrid, a kind of fleshy, low-alcohol Fino. Cortes de Cima offered talha-made Viognier and Syrah. Jose de Sousa produced a mono-varietal talha wine from Sarigo, an ancient, nearly extinct Alentejo grape. Ironically, because a non-sanctioned grape, it must be bottled as table wine.

Amphora experimental flair

Another experimenter, Adega Marel, have adapted both Georgian and Australian practices using foot trodden grape paste placed into mesh bags inserted into talha, facilitating a lighter, more controlled gentle extraction. Their cross-border collaboration had talha fermented wine, matured in a large 100 year old Amontillado cask, imparting a nutty, rancio note to traditional, local talha grapes.

Other Portuguese regions, such as the Douro, Tejo, Lisboa, Bairrada, and Vinho Verde, have reshaped their local grapes in talha (Alvarinho, Baga, Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca …) totally transposing stylistic expectations. Ironically, these regions beyond Alentejo cannot use the term talha, so must designate their wine as “amphora” instead.

One particularly crowded table was that of Oregon’s Beckham Estate, who not only produce Novum clay pots, but make clay renditions of Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir. Beckham’s clay-made Gewürztraminer, with two weeks of skin contact, was one of the standouts of the show. Tinted somewhere between electric pink and cloudy amber, it led and finished with intense rosewater characters. Texturally reminiscent of Alsatian Vendange Tardive, but bone dry at 12%, it was wild stuff. Gewurztraminer like we’ve never known before.

And, happily, both before and after Amphora Day, the surrounding villages continued their ancient tradition of adega crawling. In the hidden tascas of the narrow back streets, those of us lucky enough to experience this more intimate experience found an open-hearted community keen to share its prized possession: the 2021 vintage of talha wine.