Author: Rafaela Ferraz / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the small town of Boticas, Portugal, a centuries-old tradition of making “wine of the dead” lives on. Despite its macabre name, this libation has less to do with death than it does with burial. In 19th-century Portugal, during a time of French invasions, people interred scores of bottles.
The move, done out of fear that the wine would fall into enemy hands, led to an extraordinary discovery once the dust had settled.In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army first started the march towards Lisbon. It was an attempt to force Portugal to join the Continental System—essentially a large-scale embargo against British trade. Despite Portugal’s precarious isolation, and its place on the edge of a continent that bowed to Napoleon’s rule, it had refused to join. They would refuse again, choosing instead to honor a long-lasting alliance with the United Kingdom.
The French took Lisbon in November, but by then the Portuguese royal family had sailed off to Brazil, hoping to establish the capital across the Atlantic and maintain a bureaucratic semblance of independence. Unimpressed by this abandonment, and exhausted by the French’s freshly minted taxes and old-school plundering (this was an army that marched on its stomach, and favored stolen local wine to wash it all down), people grew restless under occupation. Movements of popular resistance popped up all over the country, but when the United Kingdom intervened a year later, the French went away.
Napoleon wasn’t keen on the news. As long as Portugal remained aligned with the United Kingdom, the latter would have a point of entry into what he believed was his continent. By March 1809, the second invasion was underway, and the French army entered Portugal from the north, hoping to secure the country’s second largest city, Porto. Again they left behind an unrivaled trail of sacked and ruined communities, but not everyone was caught unaware: Boticas, a town of a few hundred inhabitants, had plans for a passive-aggressive mutiny up its collective sleeve.
Well aware of the French’s fondness for pillaging wine, the population rushed to the cellars and buried every last bottle in the gravel underneath the barrels, far from the greedy hands of the invading army. It’s likely the French felt parched when marching through…
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