Frazão: treading grapes like it’s 1923

Foot-treading Fridays

The smell of fermenting must drifts up from the granite press and, if you lean over the stone lip, you can still hear the wet slap of bare feet on grapes and someone singing a verse that refuses to end. Frazão’s communal lagar de pégula is the last in Paços de Ferreira where the vintage is crushed exactly as it was in 1923: no electricity, no stainless steel, just neighbours taking turns to balance on the rim, trousers rolled to the knee. Whoever grows fruit brings it on the first Friday after the feast of São Mateus; whoever doesn’t brings a willingness to be splashed purple and leaves with a five-litre carafe that tastes of fourteen days’ collective effort.

Broken stone, intact memory

Local etymology claims the name comes from the Latin fractus – shattered rock – and the landscape obliges: schist slopes are so fissured that even the cattle test each step. The parish church of São Brás, rebuilt in 1755 after the same lightning strike that cracked the tower in Porto, shelters a gilded retable that still calculates interest by candlelight. Climb the cobbled track to the Capela de São Sebastião and the entire Sousa valley tilts below you: vineyard terraces staggered like a giant’s staircase after one too many glasses of vinho verde. The thirteenth-century bridge downstream has carried ox-carts, Soviet-era tractors and, this morning, a German cyclist who stopped to photograph the exact view on a 1987 postcard.

February throats and paper cod

On 3 February the image of São Brás is carried through the streets and dona Aldina – self-elected chairwoman of flour and sugar – slices her orange-scented bolo de São Brás with the authority of a town-planning officer. Accept two pieces and you are either family or extraordinarily fortunate. A sprig of cork oak is still nailed above doorways “for the throat” in a superstition no one can explain and everyone observes. Three weeks later the “burial of the cod” ends winter festivities: a cardboard fish is paraded to accordion music, lowered into a hastily dug grave behind the cemetery wall, and the congregation retreats to the Tasca do Zé for glasses of sharp, chilled white that scrape the tongue like a well-honed razor.

What the schist gives back

Rojão pork is braised until the fat collapses into the sauce and is eaten with corn bread robust enough to survive a pocket. When the copper pot appears it means one thing – papas de sarrabulho – a blood-and-cumin porridge that no one attempts for fewer than twelve guests and which must be stirred clockwise, always clockwise. Finish with suspiros de Frazão, meringues that dissolve before the spoon reaches the plate; buy an extra bag for the drive home because they will not survive the first roundabout.

Between presses and cork oaks

The signed footpath “Caminhos de Frazão” is eight kilometres, three if your spouse has lunch waiting. It threads past ruined water-mills, moss-covered threshing floors and a cork oak pocked by 1970s catapult practice. At Quinta da Aveleira stone barbecues and a creaking swing wait beside the stream; bring charcoal and remember to douse the embers – the fire station is only two fields away but no one wants to spend Sunday explaining singed grass to a volunteer fireman.

When the bell of São Brás tolls the Angelus, the sun slips behind the belfry and the vineyards glow the colour of burnt sugar. Somewhere below, a dog rehearses the evening news – or perhaps it is simply a neighbour calling her husband to supper.