Inside An Amphora

I hated hoeing vines. It is difficult, hard work that left my hands blistered and sore no matter how I gloved and bandaged them. Like the ébourgeonnage (which we took up once the sun had grown too hot and us too tired to continue the hoeing we started at dawn), I was bad at it. Wires supported each vine necessitating that I hoe aggressively yet gently underneath them, making seemingly no difference at all. Each unique lump of earth and rock was its own private hell that, once overcome, led on to a billion new private hells waiting just in line behind it, stretching on into infinity. So, I was mutely but transparently ecstatic when one day I was told that after only two hours of hoeing I had a new, glamorous mission: help the parents of Baptiste, the winemaker, retrieve a thousand liters of red wine from two clay amphorae buried in the ground.

I had already met Claire and Olivier several times in passing. On the day that I arrived at the chateau, Claire was raking neon coals and fluttering white ashes into a metal wheelbarrow. She was in a poetic semi-outdoor space with a new slate roof, where what was once a pile of indiscriminate rubble is now discriminate piles of rubble heaped mostly in corners. When Gaëlle and Baptiste excavated this structure, they discovered a treasure: a large wood-fired bread oven, intact apart from minor cracks. Once a week, Claire prepares pain au levain, round semi-whole wheat loaves raised with a sourdough culture. With a relaxed but business-like manner, she mixes the dough in a box like a small coffin with sloping sides. While the dough rises, she vanishes to do something else, like make one of her famous creamy, whispery brioches. When she returns, she stokes a thunderous fire with big blazing bundles of twigs, cleans the oven floor with a steaming wet rag at the end of a long pole, and finally slides in the loaves one by one with a paddle. She is beautiful and strong with a level gaze that immediately made me long for her approval. She makes the bread for family and friends and has a very precious, tatty piece of paper where she keeps her calculations for the quantities of ingredients required. I think that normally she makes twenty loaves.

Olivier, like his grandfather before him and his son after, is a maker of natural wine. “Natural wine” sounds like a floppy marketing term but it specifies wine that is made without the myriad chemicals and pesticides that have been going into conventional wine since the mid-twentieth century. In recent years it has come into fashion, but Olivier has been making wine as his forefathers did for decades, using the labor of horses and men, and he is something of a legend. Charismatic and brilliant, he is one of those rare personalities who comes across as completely authentic while having many layers, each with a distinctive face: straightforward and humble, instructive and focused, twinkly and vague, put out and sardonic, wise and magnanimous, self-aware and of clownish good humor.

It would have been a privilege just to spend the day working for these rare individuals, following their instructions, shadowing their conversations, and absorbing as much as I could, but they also invited me for lunch and dinner in their glorious home, giving me a tour of their cave and delicious, rare wines to sip while I responded to their questions about my life and listened as they told me about theirs. It was fascinating, generous, and kind, and I will never forget it so long as I live!

Before the amphorae, we stopped to visit Olivier’s mother in the house that he built her on the edge of his vineyard, in the center of the village. The house was cozy, a pleasant airy mixture of old and new that smelled of the wood fire she had lit to chase off the damp morning chill. Afterward, I rolled the bicycle I had ridden to the vines where Olivier collected me and propped it up under a cherry tree. The first amphora was covered with a lid and protected by half of an old barrel.

When I reached out my arms for the barrel, Olivier cried, “Wait!”, and gestured for me to move aside. This barrel was very fragile and rickety and had to be touched gingerly lest it collapse. As he was explaining this, the barrel did just that—one wooden rib fell sideways out of place from the metal band that clasped them all together, which triggered the others to follow in a rapid, clattery domino effect that was at once instant chaos and stunningly elegant. I filled the silence that followed with peals of laughter while he looked down at the barrel-turned-pile, chagrined. “Wow! That was spectacular!” I offered, too loudly (we both laughed when it happened again, to the second barrel).

Once the wine was uncovered, Olivier produced a testing device, a highly specified piece of innovative technology designed for one specific purpose, which is to say that it was a plastic test tube tied to a stick of bamboo. He lowered it in and pulled out the wine. It glowed dark tulip red as he poured out three glasses set upon an old garden table speckled with circles of rust. Behind me, looking up a slope with a red rose in bloom, I saw Claire arriving on her bicycle.

They explained the history of the amphorae to me (the people of Georgia have been making wine in these for eight thousand years) and how Olivier came to make one of his wines, Qvevri, in this manner (they visited winemakers in Georgia). I pulled up my sleeve and showed them my tattoo, based on a real Greek urn that depicts a group of bearded satyrs making wine with huge erections (not reproduced in my tattoo). “It is meant to be!” we said, clinking glasses. Here we are tasting it. It was delicious.

Straight out of the amphora, unstrained and unoxidized, it tasted of red fruit and summer with undercurrents of earth and animal that resolved into the dryness of clay, the taste of the amphora itself. The amphora is lined with an inner coat of beeswax, and the fermenting fruit becomes crystalline juice that floats atop, with marc—the seeds and skin—settled into sediment along the bottom.

To pull out the wine, we began with a bucket, sliding it into the surface and heaving it out half-full to pour into a large container in the van. When the wine became too far to reach, Olivier attached a rope and showed me how to throw the bucket upside-down so that it sank instead of bobbing on the surface. Finally, when both rope and bucket could no longer reach, I lowered myself nervously in, bracing my weight on my hands and my elbows until I slipped into the dark jammy marc. Then I handed it up with a pitcher, a ladle, and at the end, a sponge.

Inside the amphora, there was an odd echo, like a tall narrow stairwell but warmer. I am trying to think of what I can compare it to but I haven’t been in many spaces of that size and shape before. The bottom is pointed so I braced my weight on the sides while avoiding places where the clay had cracked and been repaired. One year they filled an amphora without realizing it was cracked and every last drop of the wine disappeared into the earth below.

Once the amphora is empty and clean, the walls are splashed with a strong eau de vie before it is covered again. The alcohol evaporates, condenses, drips down the sides, and evaporates again in a passive sterilizing cycle that prepares the urn for the next harvest. Claire, the only one who could fit into the small amphora, had to rinse it with the eau de vie while she was still inside it, which left her VERY light-headed.

Then we carted the wine to the cave and heaved the marc into the press. The press is wood and metal and turned by a handle that you must lean your weight upon as you walk forward. It sits on a floor that slopes gently down towards a deep stone sink set in the ground. The wine seeps around it evenly and gathers in a curve like a long, velvet feather, flowing to a spigot made of stone.

The second press was magical. First, we dismantled the press and leant its heavy, slick puzzle pieces of wood against the wall. This revealed the gateau, a perfect cabernet disk of condensed marc that looks like the world’s biggest plum cake. We broke it up with rakes and shovels and scattered it across the floor. It crumbled into jagged chunks and glistened like crushed ice or sugar crystals, except that it was steaming. Cool, smoky rivulets of vaporizing alcohol rose up from the crumbled marc, and the heady smell moved over us like weather.

At the end of the evening, Olivier gave me a bottle of the previous year’s Qvevri, 2020. A few weeks into my next wwoofing mission, I opened and shared it with my hosts, two fellow wooffers, and some cyclists who were camping with us for the night.

Sinking my nose into the wine, I smelled plums and blackberry jam, maybe even damsons, with something dark and green behind, like nettles and tall weedy grasses crushed underfoot. Then it was effervescent on the tongue, a common feature of natural wine (some people like this; those who do not can decant it, releasing the bubbles and leaving it still). I got a hint of tobacco, of quince, more of that sweet and water-starved late summer fruit, and whiffs of outdoors—sheep and sweat and dirt but fresh and wholesome, like digging out a pair of hiking boots from a clean cupboard at the start of an adventurous day. Then I got the taste of the amphora: it tasted of beeswax and clay, but perhaps that was because I knew that they were there.

Perhaps I tasted wild animals, nettles, and grass because I had smelled them that morning. The previous night, alone with the end of a bonfire and Touraine’s massive sky of improbably brilliant stars, I heard wild boar traipsing the grasses around me. The next morning, I followed the paths they had cut and found their beds and the smoky, slightly spicy scent they left as they slept. In one place they had felt stressed out and trapped and turned round in circles, weaving the grass into low baskets that still, the next morning, preserved the sharp smell of their fear. For weeks, nobody believed me that the boars came at night; it was a running joke that I was trying to convince them. “This is where they got stuck!” I shouted at everyone over the fence, rubbing at another nettle sting on my leg. So perhaps the boar defined my references and taste. For Bernard, one of my hosts, the Qvevri reminded him of the cooperative cave of the southern village where he grew up, where the villagers processed their families’ wine. “The freshness of nature in the morning,” he said, holding his glass, “very fresh… it smells of earth!” The others were too shy to tell me what they thought, and looked down into their glasses as I held my pen aloft, expectantly.

I was once a member of a wine society where I tasted some extraordinary wines in environments and with companions of varying degrees of snootiness. A friend there told me about a study where groups of experts tasted the same wine on separate occasions and came up with different descriptions; the tasting was not just influenced but defined by the experience of being with each other, of hearing your companions speak about the flavors and the memories the wine invoked for them. When those memories and references are shared, wine has the unusual power to bring about collective reverie. That reverie can seem like it comes from inside the bottle, but it also comes from outside—or from inside the drinkers—as well. At one of this society’s events, I once compared an odor in a wine to an old bathing suit, “when you’re at the beach and leave it on a peg for several days and then you go to put it on again when it is sunny.” “Yes,” someone returned, rolling their eyes, “We call that ‘must’.” Unsophisticated as it is, I prefer my bathing suit reference (and Baptiste was delighted with this story!).

When I was a child, my brother and I sometimes played a very clever game in which we took turns climbing into our family’s old tumble dryer while the other closed the door and turned it on. It would rotate half a turn before turning off in protest at the weight of the body inside it, which was fun enough to play this game repeatedly (a secret from our parents, of course). I could compare being inside the amphora to being in that dryer, in terms of echo, size proportionate to me, physical discomfort, the risk of breaking something valuable to someone more important than me, and how it felt to watch the round of light disappear as my brother closed the door: a mild but intoxicating fear that I would be unable to get out again. “What if I get stuck and have to live in here forever?” I wondered silently to myself, looking at the wax and wine-streaked walls around me and my waxy, wine-streaked legs inside the walls. The scrapes and scratches on my hands were soaked, tattooing my hoeing wounds purple for days. The smell of the wine in which I was effectively bathing brushed across my senses in overwhelming waves: alcohol, blackberries, violets, feet.

Who can say which smell came from the wine and which from my sensory history? I cannot, and especially not in this singular, intense instance when both wine and I were inside the amphora—the two of us red beneath a bright blue disk of day, ready to rejoin the world outside.