Voyage in amphora by Keiko and Maïka | Woino

We briefly thought that we may have reached our final destination. However, we did not hear that announcement at the end of our journey when we arrived in Georgia five years ago, in 2011. With no further information about our sleeper, we hurried on. We were greeted by what sounded like a festive polyphony to our ears, "mravalijamieri, mravalijamieri, mravalijamieri…!" Has our journey truly ended here? For real...?

It is true that the road has been long since our exceptional encounter with Montrachet. No longer quite in the upper class, we left Burgundy for other destinations in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and so on... Certainly, we increasingly turned towards the East, until we reached this hidden gem! A country with 525 astonishing varieties of good wines; where the "kvevri" (Georgian amphora) originated about 2,700 years ago.

However, no sudden revelation came to greet our presence in Georgia and its remarkable 69,700 km2 of terroir. The true revealing encounter took place in Turkey during a stopover with Udo Hirsch, winemaker, photographer, archaeologist, and handyman in Cappadocia in 2014. Up until then, we had mixed up the starting and ending lines! Our story had just begun, just like that of wine, thousands of years ago, with the amphora. Our intuition returned; we welcome it back and set out together to seek the truth elsewhere!

We hope that the publication of this book "Voyage en Amphore*" which is very dear to us, will encourage others to step forward and create "Le Vin" in terracotta. This is our sincerest wish.

To conclude our preface, we deeply thank all our friends who contributed to the realization of this fabulous project, and especially Udo Hirsch, for his thesis on clay pots, and Josep Roca for his introduction. We also thank Christine Biloré and Vanessa Thiernesse for their translations, Iago Bitarishvili for his contribution, Woino the publisher, and the CEZANNE printing house, especially our friend Roberto de Pila. We wish to dedicate this book to them with love and loyalty beyond any commercial consideration. As evidence, we wrote it in French, contrary to neoliberalism.

Now, are you ready to go on a journey? Great, passengers at the gates, please open the doors! Let's go!

Keiko and Maïka

*What a beautiful term "Voyage en Amphore"! It was inspired by Agnès Henry-Hocquard from Domaine de la Tour du Bon in Brûlat du Castellet in Var. Thank you Agnès for this beautiful expression that makes us dream of the Mediterranean!

Note: In this book, we will also present some conventional producers with their clay pots and hope that one day they will join us in the biconditional world of "Amphora and Natural Wine".