The amphorae of Tierra Savia

Transcript

When we came here we said... we have to conserve the old varieties and the old forms of making wine. So we started looking in the old bodegas and at every site we found... for example, you remember that man in Blanco-Morenos? We asked this man:

"Do you have amphoras like this?"
"Yes."
"How are they?"
"I think they are okay."
"Great. Then we will take them. We will buy them."

And so we bought them and we brought them here.

There were some that we had to repair. On the inside we put bees wax. And we said to ourselves: we want to make wine using old varieties, old techniques in old storage vessels. But not just to do it for its own sake. Because in reality, to make wine in this is really different to making wine in that for example.

If you put wine, the white wine we make - for example Mirlo - in that the wine doesn't breathe at all; it's in stainless steel. But here, the amphoras let in air. They are made with soil from here...

You know these amphoras are really old. This one for example, on each amphora they put their sign and on this one they also put a date. Sixteen-hundred and forty-eight. That's the era when they began putting vines here, the 17th century. The 16th to 17th century. It's really old!

Aging the wine, it's like in a barrel. It's like injecting mini doses of oxygen. It totally changes the wine. The oxygen enters and totally changes the wine. It doesn't add any flavours. It doesn't bring any flavours. For example when you put wine in here it gives the flavour of wood. But not in here.

So what we wanted to do was take the local varieties, make them in a pure way that doesn't impart any flavour, and do it all in the ancient vessels, like they did in the past.

Apart from recovering old flavours, old aromas, we really like the idea that the old people told us the white varieties were made using the skin of the grape. And they did it this way because it's a very easy way to do it - and because it gives much more body to the wine... instead of it being such a soft wine, we have a little more body, that's why we do it this way.