Anyone seeing the form of an odre for the first time will easily conclude that it was made out of an animal’s full skin. A goat weighing 20 kg. (44 lb.) provides enough leather for a 90-liter (23.7-gallon) odre. Although an essential object in rural Spain’s economy for centuries, odres are today practically extinct as wine and olive oil storage and transportation containers. Tourists might still find some display pieces hanging from the ceiling in souvenir stores or museums, remnants of a more sustainable past where human beings were closer to nature. Today, the function of the odre has been entirely taken over by plastic crates, bottles and stackable containers with geometric, rather than animalized, forms. Odres were made from one single piece of leather -the animal’s full skin- for several reasons: to maximize the volume that can be contained per skin; to facilitate the lifting and transportation on human backs of such heavy load; and to preserve the integrity of the container with a form that naturally distributes the pressure of the liquid inside all over its surface so that it can resist tough handling without breaking. A long and complex leather treatment process preceded the handcrafting of odres: the leather was soaked in water and oak bark powder for a month, hung to dry, soaked in oil, hung again, painted with pez (see bota), sewn, filled with liquid and rinsed several times, and left to dry before it was ready to be used.
