Let’s be honest: most wine books are as dry as are Dão’s terroirs in mid-July. They talk about “notes of forest floor” and “soil acidity” until your eyes glaze over. Foot Trodden by Simon J. Woolf and Ryan Opaz is quite another animal. It’s not a textbook; more like a road trip through Portugal in a car that might break down at any moment. The scenery is so good you don’t really care.
For a long time, the rest of the world ignored Portuguese wine or thought it was just cheap stuff. But because the country was “stuck in time” for decades, they didn’t pull up their weird, local grapes to plant boring things like Merlot. Now, those old vines and obscure grapes are exactly what everyone wants. It turns out that being “behind the times” was the smartest move they never intended to make. And the book basically tells the story of how cool of a kid vinous Portugal right now really is.
You’ll learn about the lagares—these big stone vessels where people literally jump in and stomp grapes with their feet. It sounds like a messy tourist attraction, but it’s actually a genius way to make wine. Your feet are soft enough to crush the fruit without breaking the seeds, which keeps the wine from tasting bitter. The book makes you feel the cold stone and the sticky juice between your toes without you actually having to ever get dirty (although, you could!). Then there are the people. You meet winemakers who act more like rebels or artists than farmers. They are obsessed with saving grapes that almost went extinct. There’s a great section on Talha wine, where they use giant clay pots that haven’t changed since the Romans were around. It’s direct, it’s honest, and it’s about people who give a damn about their history.
If you like wine but hate the snobbery that usually comes with it, this is for you. It’s smart, it’s funny, and the photos are beautiful—not “fake” beautiful, but “real life” beautiful, with dirt and calloused hands.
By the end, you’ll want to grab a bottle of something salty from the coast, sit on a terrace, and appreciate the fact that some things are still made the hard way.
It looks like a book about wine, but really, it’s a book about not selling your soul to be like everyone else.
