Those driving Galicia’s back roads between November and June have to keep their eyes peeled. It could be stuck to a fence, perched above a door, or jutting from a wall. At first sight, a simple branch. But it’s not just any branch. It’s from a laurel tree, placed somewhere easily visible to passers-by, and the universally agreed-upon signal for one of Galicia’s most unique drinking establishments. They have no standardized schedules, no predictability, and no guaranteed availability. Each one opens when they please, and closes when the last drop has been drained from the barrels. These aren’t even bars, with a liquor license, rent to pay, and opening hours listed on Google Maps. These are furanchos: private houses that sell wine left over from their harvest, accompanied by hearty helpings of food made right in front of you. Most furanchos are located in the province of Pontevedra around the Salnés Valley and Morrazo peninsula.
The history of the furancho begins in medieval times. Each household with vines produced wine for the needs of their family, and then sold the surplus right there in their own houses. Modern furancheiros have vines in and around their villages and make wine in the traditional style, mixing different grape varieties and fermenting the juice in wooden barrels (not always oak, sometimes chestnut). Some even use stainless steel tanks.
When the wine is ready, it’s poured into white ceramic bowls called cuncas. The cunca is often accompanied by wine in a ceramic jug called a jarra so that guests can replenish their supply as they like, but you’ll never see a glass bottle on the table. Furancho-goers can order water, but there are no other drinks on the menu.
The food on offer is of limited selection but of epic proportion. There are plates of chorizo, jamón serrano and cheeses, Padrón peppers, fried eggs, grilled sardines, pig’s ear, tripe with chickpeas, Spanish tortilla, empanada, and croquetas galore. In an inversion of the BYOB dynamic, sometimes patrons of the furancho can bring their own food to eat there, and pay only for the wine they drink.
If it sounds too good to be true, you’re on the right track. The legal status of furanchos has always been semi-controversial because the Tax Man has always wanted in. Up until relatively recently, they remained in a sort of murky, legal limbo—neither legal nor illegal, which caused tensions with the hospitality industry, which accused furancheiros of operating de facto bars without having to pay the same taxes as a regular bar. The Galician government made a first attempt at regulation in 2008, banning the sale of food made on the premises but allowing furancho owners to serve store-bought food. The regulations also demanded handicap access, buildings that were up to code, and bathrooms with modern plumbing, among a long list of requirements.
The Furancho Association pushed back against this, making the case that it’s not exactly easy to bring a 500-year-old farmhouse up to modern restaurant standards. Today’s regulations are more focused on the quality of the wine being served, differentiating furanchos from restaurants since the furancho now has to have its own registered vineyards, declare the grapes and must that are collected each harvest, and report what food will be sold. In return, they’re given an ID number to be hung up alongside the laurel branch.
Here’s where my provocative title comes in.
The wine served in a furancho is minimal intervention, made according to tradition—often using hybrid grape varieties—and often doesn’t contain sulfur. That sounds like something Alice Feiring would drink, right?
Furanchos are a great example of “wine for the people,” where the intermediaries between the vines and low-cost, accessible wine are pretty much nonexistent. But the lowly furancho is often forgotten in mainstream accounts of Galician wine tradition. A book published by the Galician government in the early 2000s notes as an aside that serious wine lovers “know better now” than to drink wine from a cunca. It seems like the winemaking establishment either forgets about the furancho entirely or regards it as something of an embarrassment.
This is a great example of the curious relationship between tradition and modernity in Galicia, and the anthropologists Pablo Alonso González and Eva Parga Dans have a fantastic article that lays it out. González and Dans argue that self-proclaimed natural winemakers in Galicia also make low-intervention wines with minimal sulfur, but the difference is that they have access to an establishment of wine critics, sommeliers, and importers who help them reach the natural-wine-drinking public (who tend to pay a premium for the wine).
González and Dans write that “Furanchos avoid the modern division between spaces of production and consumption. Both spheres are bridged by the Galician performative notion of enxebre, meaning authentic, genuine, natural, or unspoiled. Making enxebre wine involves a rejection of oenological science and wine chemistry, and a celebration of naturalness and handiwork.”
The notion—whether performative or not—of “authentic, genuine, natural, and unspoiled” is pretty in right now. So what’s the difference between what comes out of a furancho and what gets poured for $18 a glass in Brooklyn? Is the expensive stuff just the by-product of a supply chain of intermediaries bringing products to elite consumers thousands of miles away, telling us that something is more worthy because it’s natural and comes with a fun label? I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.
But if you want to drink cool wine for cheap in an interesting setting, head to Galicia and look out for the laurel branches. Regardless of their official standing, furanchos are an important part of the tradition in Galicia, and they deserve a seat at the table when talking about the history of the way wine was made and consumed here for hundreds of years.