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.
Similarly impressive are Adega Cooperativa de Vidigueira, Cuba
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
