Theme:
1. The Material Record: Current Trends and Future Directions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Make Dolia Great Again - Comparative Perspectives on Ancient Clay-jar Winemaking
Content:
In today’s wine scene, clay-jar winemaking is a discrete phenomenon, mainly confined to the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia) and a few artisan winemakers in Mediterranean Europe (Greece, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal) and South America (Peru, Chile). In Antiquity, however, such jars were standard equipment in winemaking facilities spreading from the Caucasus to the Iberian Peninsula. They were the ‘karas’ of the Armenian Urartu Kingdom, the ‘pithoi’ of the Greeks and the ‘dolia’ of the Romans. Surprisingly however, current research on ancient wine has largely ignored the role of these containers in ancient wine production and economy, and their influence on ancient wines’ sensory properties remains poorly understood.
With this session, we aim to re-establish the role of clay jars in ancient wine studies by concentrating on aspects of their making and on their effects on wine fermentation and storage. To this purpose, we intend to bring together a holistic and comparative group of researchers working on ancient and contemporary clay jar winemaking in the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and beyond. We are particularly interested in talks dealing with clay jar typologies and forms, geographical and chronological distributions, and archaeometric studies of clay composition and vessel contents; especially if such work leads to insights into processes of wine fermentation and organoleptic evolution.
Keywords:
dolia, pithoi, wine, pottery
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Paulina Komar (Poland) 1
Co-organisers:
Dimitri Van Limbergen (Belgium) 2
Affiliations:
1. University of Warsaw
2. Ghent University
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