The Amphora Project

We have a very amusing guest post today from Miquel Hudin, a Californian in Catalonia, who is well worth following here.

Keeping track of guys in Catalunya is tricky as there seem to only be several names which happen to repeat a great deal.

Josep, Jordi, Joan, and Jaume are all very popular and those are just the very popular J's. Given this common repetition, nicknames are rampant as seen when I started venturing to the Priorat wine region to meet a Josep in one village who’d worked in Australia for a harvest and from then on was deigned, "the Australian".

When looking to the A’s, Albert is quite common as well. One of them happens to be the assistant winemaker at another prominent winery who was not only very knowledgeable but also had the patience of a saint. In a cold morning of one mid-September, I found myself hashing out what seemed a simple plan with this Saint Albert whilst sipping the forgettable coffee of the village.

"So, you want to make a wine in a clay amphora?"

"Yes."

"Huh. How'd you get this idea into your head?"

"My mother was a ceramicist and it's just something I wanted to try for a while. Cesc mentioned you might be up for helping me make sure it doesn't go feral.”

"But… you want to do some 'natural wine' thing?"

"Not if I can help it."

"Um… okay, if it's not some weird 'hippie' thing sure, why not, let’s give it a try and see what happens."

I was giddy with the excitement to make a wine for the first time, even if experimental and potentially, garbage, although if the latter, I wasn't sure how I'd hide the three-hundred-liter corpse...

I drove three hours north from Priorat to a village near the provincial and cyclist-besieged capital of Girona where a local ceramicist named Eloi had started remaking these ancient wine vessels. Admittedly, they're less classic Roman amphora like you'd see in a museum and more a hefty, 1.5m tall, 70kg clay cylinder which I tossed across the back seat of my small "this is definitely not a pickup" car, and drove back down to Priorat.

Once back, Saint Albert's confirmation of where the wine was to be made became hazier than the morning fogs along the Ebre River, so the amphora ended up being "stored" in the car for a bit longer than expected. Due to this, word had started to spread about my pet amphora as it was the early twenty teens and everyone making wine in Catalunya had amphora on the brain.

When going to the butcher, the amphora was noted.

When getting gas, it was noted again by the attendant.

Having made the extremely curvy 9km drive between the village of Porrera and the capital village of Falset almost every day, that damned amphora had been banging about my backseat for over a week like a child throwing a temper tantrum behind you on an airplane.

I politely badgered Saint Albert about where it could go until he finally said, "Okay, drop it off at my work cellar on Monday." I went by, dragged it out of the car, sat it down outside the cellar door, and thought that'd be the end of it.

A few days later at the local cheese shop I bumped into a friend who said, "Hey, I saw your amphora in a pickup going to Porrera."

While a casual comment, I realized I hadn't seen this friend for at least a month so my first question was, "Hmmm, first off, how do you know it was my amphora?"

"Oh, Cesc told me you were going to make something in an amphora and then Saint Albert said he had to move it when we had coffee the other day."

Again, amphora on the brain.

In catching up with Saint Albert later, it seemed that after I'd dropped the amphora off at his work cellar, the owner wasn't really on board with my wine happening where he worked. I could understand as pirate winemaking begets piratisms. It's akin to why you don't put up the circus folk in your home when they're in town.

Saint Albert borrowed the winery pickup and moved it over to an unused cellar in Porrera—which happened to be same the village I was temporarily staying int at the time.

Once installed in that cellar (i.e., propped in a corner), everything else was smooth sailing. Saint Albert helped me locate some young garnatxa grapes from a friend of a friend in the neighboring village. They were destemmed and crushed with all 300kg tossed into the amphora for the "magic" to happen and by "magic" I mean spontaneous fermentation via the ambient yeasts.

The point behind all of this was to allow the process to happen slowly, which it most assuredly did. I checked the sugar levels religiously each day like I’d read about in various texts. Unfortunately, fermentation was taking its sweet ass time to get going as the sugar remained quite fixed. It was stressing me out a bit. The looming thought of having to drive up some road in the woods and dump this nightmare in an unmarked grave loomed large at the back of my mind.

Having worked something like 15 harvests and having seen all kinds of strange things, my frustration amused Saint Albert. About a week and a half later, the sugar density finally started to drop and pick-up speed, getting ever closer to the target of "dry".

Unfortunately, something else started, which was the leaking.

Each morning I'd come in to "punch" the rigid cap of grapes that'd formed at the top. Once done, I had to hose out this little stream of blood-red fluid that was sweating out of the amphora. The problem was that the amphora was too porous as those making clay amphorae for fermentation were relearning the process to some extent. Large vessels like these were more recently used to store the much more viscous olive oil, not wine.

Why it took time to appear was that the mix of grapes wasn't terribly fluid initially but as it broke down, the sugars were converted to CO2 and that most lovely of concoctions: alcohol. At that point it became much more fluid and started to pass through the amphora. This started in the middle of November which was also the moment where the weather goes from being fall one day, to winter the next. In a non-heated cellar, suddenly you have a temperature wherein the yeast don’t have the warmth necessary to do their yeasty thing.

It wasn’t just the yeasts that were suffering as I had to move out of my place in Porrera then as well. That change of season had also exposed the fact that my rented house was unable to hold any warmth and, much like my precious yeasts, I was unable to function.

Thankfully, Saint Albert had been there before and had a solution (at least on the wine front): fish tank heaters. He dropped these waterproof little heaters into the amphora and they gave just enough heat to see the wine through to finish alcoholic fermentation. Brilliant.

Once finished, we also decided it was time to part ways with the amphora. Its leaky qualities weren't just annoying to us, but also to the owner of the cellar who was seeing that the pirate project he'd let in the door was going a bit sideways. We transferred the wine to glass demijohns to wait out the rest of the winter.

Out of hope that it could still be salvaged, I initially stored the amphora outside the cellar in a corner and gave it as much thought as one would a broken planter.

Saint Albert and I bottled the wine the next summer, calling it, "Trempera de Porrera" with a label designed by a talented artist friend back in San Francisco. "Trempera" literally means "something that excites or motivates" but it's also well-known slang in Catalan for an erection. After all, slightly naughty jokes are the fuel that keeps natural and low-intervention wine labels going.

Saint Albert called me shortly after bottling and said that the owner of the cellar would very much like my wayward amphora to leave the building, immediately. I had nowhere else to store it given that I was back and I thought it could be used for "something" in Priorat. So, I managed to beg another Albert with a cellar to let me toss it in his premises temporarily.

It stayed parked at the entrance until one day he too grew tired of people asking him what he was doing with it and thus asked me to find it yet another new home. Despite having enjoyed several of my "Erection of Porrera" bottles of wine that came from this amphora, I believed it and all other amphorae in the world were nothing but a burden on one's life and made the decision it was to be smashed up and tossed in the trash bin.

One morning I made my way down to the cellar with a large hammer, a bin, and the weighty resignation to deal with this behemoth once and for all.

Just as I was getting ready to take care of business, Jordi, a burgeoning new-age spiritualist in the village, saw me.

"Miquel, what the hell are you doing?!!"

"I'm going to break this thing apart."

"But you can't do that! Can you not feel the energy that radiates from it? It has such a fine form, such beautiful depth. I can feel the inner life from it. Can't you?"

"Um… no but if you want it, it's yours."

"Really? You're sure?" he asked in disbelief of the luck which had found him that morning.

"Yes, please take it."

"Oh, you're a graceful soul… but you must tell me, what is your favorite tree?"

"Huh? I don't know, olives are pretty nice."

"Then I will plant one inside it, in your honor."

Life doesn't often throw much satisfaction your way, but I was satisfied that the Amphora Project had finally drawn to a close and I must assume there is an olive tree growing inside a leaky amphora somewhere within the village of Porrera to this day.

And as if to show that life imitates irony, Saint Albert, who was so skeptical of “hippie wine” project in the first place, is now making one of the more successful natural wines to emerge from Priorat in ages.

Will there ever be another “Trempera de Porrera”?

There have been other wines since, but a large winemaking cooperative (that I seriously doubt to have ever encountered my wine) knew a good Catalan slang when they heard it and trademarked the name a few years ago.

So, as is quite proper with this style of natural-ish wines, it was and will always be, a “unicorn”.

This is a chapter adapted from a forthcoming book by Miquel Hudin about Catalunya and the wine industry. Follow his newsletter or read Hudin.com to learn more.