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.
Paul White’s favourite 2024 talha wines at Amphora Day 2024
During Amphora Day festivities Rocim tapped 1,500-liter talhas, sharing the latest harvest with a thousand eager participants crowding around the pots with outstretched glasses. Both the reds and the whites were remarkably finished wines with the whites 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.
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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 points). 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 flavors, 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 favorite Portuguese talha-made wines with a bit of age
Vila Alva’s XXVI Talhas have an increasingly impressive track record of talha-specific bottlings. Their XXVI Talhas Talha X Branco 2023 (11.5%) contains a field blend of 11 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).
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Legendary Alentejo winemaker David Baverstock retired from Esporão 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 85-year-old vineyards. The tinto packs in amazing cherry-esque fruit depth. Dense, taut, and velvety in the mouth—real iron fist in a velvet glove stuff—it delivers tremendous flavor 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 at Amphora Day 2024
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” and 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 bâtonnage by way of that curvaceous shape,” wondering, “Why won’t this settle?,” then self-answering, “Ah, texture—love that!Æ
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 savory, more depth, and a juicier finish (91).
Stellenbosch’s Kleine Zalze have been working on 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 Chenin honey and 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-sulfite wines, her qvevri wines favor 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 a 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).
Piedmont’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 licorice, it’s velvety in the mouth with fine tannins and acidity cutting through (89). RataRaura 2022 (13%), following a similar regime, offers up funky, savory 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 starting blocks. 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, in a positive way, 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.
