The new brand by Pottery & Poetry for collectible wine vessels designed around the character of a specific wine.
Calassi comes from καλός — Greek for beautiful, кал — Bulgarian for earth, clay, soil, and calyx — the ancient vessel for serving and sharing wine.
It brings us the beauty of the earth.
From the Plate to the Wine Vessel
The plate is part of the dish. We’ve known that ever since we started creating bespoke tableware for chefs and restaurants all over the world. Just like every space deserves its own design, every culinary masterpiece can be enhanced by a plate that is mindfully crafted especially for it.
This became the starting point for Materia Mensa — our audiovisual project exploring the collaboration between a ceramic artist and a chef, and the way material, taste and plating shape the perception of food.
When the next chapter of Materia Mensa led to AYA Estate Vineyards, our research raised another question: How is it that wine, one of the most complex drinks, is now served almost exclusively in one of the most visually neutral materials? For thousands of years, wine had vessels for fermentation, preservation, transportation, serving, drinking and ceremonial offerings. Amphorae, chalices and ritual objects carried form, material, ornament and symbolism.
Wine has never been just a drink to consume. It was always served as a ritual. And most of the ritual in wine serving disappeared when wine started to be served mainly in glass carafes.
Bringing Back the Ritual of Wine
So we asked ourselves another question: What if wine once again had a vessel made specifically for serving it? Could the object in our hands prepare us for its aromas, flavours and finish before we taste it?
These questions were the beginning of CALASSI. They took us deep into the science of human perception and especially crossmodal perception — the relationships between what we see, touch, smell and taste. We started working with everything ceramics can give us — form, colour, texture, glaze, weight and feel — to translate the character of a wine into something you can experience before the first sip.
A partnership that truly matters.
The First CALASSI Collection
After six months of research, sketching, sculpting, firing, and countless glaze trials and errors, on September 12th at AYA Estate Vineyards, we introduced the first limited CALASSI collection built around the sensory profiles of five AYA wines. The “Soil To Soul” launch event combined the premiere of the fourth episode of Materia Mensa with the same name that follows the process of CALASSI inception and realisation from scratch to finish, our curated exhibition with drawings, samples, prototypes and glaze experiments, and as always with a new Materia Mensa episode, a chef’s special dinner pairing AYA wines with recipes inspired by the Melnik region. The culinary masterminds behind the menu were our close collaborators, the Amor Y Sal duo – Raya Silova and Nikolay Madjarov-Faycheto. Faycheto was also the composer of the music for the evening and author of the soundtrack for the short film.
Where Art, Craft and Science Meet
The highlight of this special night was welcoming the very inspiration behind Materia Mensa and CALASSI – Prof. Charles Spence from the University of Oxford, whose work on crossmodal correspondence was the foundation on which we built this whole new category of wine-serving products.
“I’ll be interested to measure the effect of the ceramic wine vessels we saw today, because no study like this has been done before — one where taste is communicated on at least four levels: size, shape, texture, and glaze. You can’t vary the form of a wine bottle, you can’t vary the finish of the glass. But with ceramics, there is far more freedom and cross-fertilization between the arts and the science that can set expectations in a more subtle way without words by just using colour and form and an intuitive or science-inspired sort of matching of these different attributes.” Prof. Spence shared with us after seeing the first CALASSI collection.
So we hope this is just the beginning of our close collaboration between art, craft, materials and science to create crossmodal vessels not just for wine, but for other complex drinks like coffee and tea.
Discover the Collection
Vessels from the CALASSI × AYA Estate collection can be purchased directly through AYA Estate and were created for:
- VMR 2025, Ayano Collection
- Rose 2025, Ayano Collection
- ZEN Chardonnay 2025, Estate Collection
- Grenache Bouquet 2025, Estate Collection
- AYANO Melnik 2020, Old Vintage Collection
Experience Soil to Soul at AYA Estate
For those who could not attend the premiere and the special dinner, Materia Mensa and AYA Estate invite the public to experience Episode 4 through a specially designed experience at the winery. From 13 to 23 September, guests at AYA Estate can take their own “from soil to soul” journey: a screening of the film, followed by a tour of the winery, the exhibition, and a tasting of five wines, each paired with a specially created culinary bite.
Reservations by phone at 0800 4 0008 or online.
Nadya Zdravkova, key partners & new business @potteryand poetry;
Founder & Creator: Maria Baleva, M.Arch.
Crafted in Sofia, Bulgaria by Pottery & Poetry ceramic studio