Furanchos: The Original Natural Wine Bar?

Photo from guiafuranchin.com

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 bars, with a license, rent to pay, and opening hours listed on Google Maps. They’re furanchos: private houses that sell wine left over from their harvest, accompanied by hearty helpings of food made right in front of you.

The history of the furancho begins in medieval times, when each household with vines produced wine for the needs of their family and sold the surplus out of their own homes. The furancho slowly died out in most of Galicia over the centuries, but the tradition was preserved in the province of Pontevedra, around the Salnés Valley and Morrazo peninsula. 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) or stainless steel tanks.

When the wine is ready, it’s poured from a ceramic jug called a jarra into white ceramic bowls called cuncas. You’ll never see anything else 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 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. Sometimes furancho patrons can even 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 limbo—neither legal nor illegal. This 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. The government relented, and today’s regulations are more focused on the quality of the wine being served. Furanchos are differentiated from restaurants by mandating that they register their own vineyards, declare the grapes that are harvested, and report what food will be sold. In return, they’re given an ID number to be hung up alongside the laurel branch.

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?

Here’s where my title comes in.

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. They’ve played a key role in Galician wine culture, encouraging wine’s consumption as a foodstuff rather than a luxury good. But the lowly furancho is often forgotten in modern 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 forgets about the furancho tradition entirely or regards it as something of an embarrassment.

This is a great example of the curious tension between tradition and modernity in Galicia. People talk about the long history of winemaking here, but prefer to overlook the long(er) history of drinking mostly homemade wine in a rustic setting like the furancho. When winemakers do talk about a “return to tradition,” it’s often with a rose-colored view of the past that largely ignores the living traditions that have survived to this day. The anthropologists Pablo Alonso González and Eva Parga Dans have a fantastic article that explores this in depth. González and Dans argue that self-proclaimed natural winemakers in Galicia make low-intervention wines with minimal sulfur, much like the people who supply furanchos, but the difference between these winemakers and the furancheiros 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 their wine).

“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—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 them that something is more worthy because it’s labeled as natural and comes with a fun label? I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

But if you want to drink unfussy 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 Galicia’s wine tradition, and they deserve a seat at the table when we talk about the way wine was made and consumed here for hundreds of years.