As we navigate a news cycle that leaves us fearful of eating food, I found myself thinking about foot treading wine grapes. You know, as one does
Yes, feet may have been in your wine. Maybe even mine?
It’s fine. There are hygienic practices in place. Any freaky-deaky pathogens you’re envisioning wouldn’t be able to survive in that alcoholic of an environment. Poop lettuce is far scarier.
I did a custom series in my past life working directly with winemakers to bottle cuvées for our stores. For the first one, I helped pick a ton of Barbera grapes and stomped the shit out of them at the winery. I was in the Sierra Foothills with a friend and it was stunningly beautiful. We crushed quietly as the winery goats bleated across the way. Dreamy stuff.
Crushing grapes releases the free-run juices destined to ferment into wine.
Foot treading is a thing because we had feet before we had machines.
Our feet have soft, even pressure, gently breaking grape skins while leaving seeds intact. Too many broken seeds = bitter flavors.
Foot treading is gentler than mechanical crushers, which may break down stems and/or seeds in an undesirable way. May! Not always! But still!
The first crush is a one-time thing. Then….
Punch downs
Same mechanics, following the initial crush, several times a day, schedule and tenure of time determined by the winemaker. [1]
During early fermentation, naturally forming carbon dioxide pushes crushed seeds and skins to the top of the bin, creating a gooey blanket of wine stuff. A less gross way to say that is to call it a cap.
We “punch” that cap back down to prevent bacterial spoilage, acidic growth, encourage color extraction, and regulate temperature throughout the bin of fermenting juice. Different grapes + different vessel sizes + hopeful desired outcomes determine frequency.
Sounds straightforward, isn’t really. It’s an all-consuming season for makers. Hopefully no one entrenched in juice from the knees down gets invited to any fall weddings.
🎶 We live in a material world, and commercial wineries are mechanization-minded girls. 🎶
So. Barefoot Wines.
NFL sponsor extraordinaire [2], cooking wine of kitchens everywhere, hangover hell for consumers. A cost-conscious darling of the goliath E. & J. Gallo Winery since being acquired in 2005. Abundantly available at grocery and gas stations across the land.
Winemaker Davis Bynum created Barefoot Bynum Burgundy in his California garage in 1965.
He sold that wine for years before becoming a pioneer of Russian River Valley Pinot Noir at the eponymous Davis Bynum Winery. His name is credited on the Barefoot website(s) for both still and bubbly wines, albeit differently.
Still wines website:
Sparkling wines website, Belgium extension. Bubbles love being unconventional!
Today, Barefoot averages an annual production of 21 million cases. This is not a small artisanal production; this is mechanized wine for the masses. Foot tread, schmoot tread.
But just for fun…how many feet would it take to foot tread 21 million cases of wine?
This is a comically imperfect math equation and I welcome all input, edits and variations.
Wine grapes are purchased by the ton - 2,000 pounds- for commercial production.
Per Cornell, let’s assume 150 gallons of finished wine in one ton, which equates to 63 cases or 756 bottles.
Wine Spectator says differently; I trust the EDU extension and variables provided by academia over Dr. Vinny. Even silly math deserves a credible source.
If Barefoot is averaging 21 million cases of wine, give or take, this suggests…
They need 333,333.33 tons of grapes. That’s a lotta fruit!
Good thing California is huge. In 2025, Californians crushed 2.6 trillion tons of wine grapes.
Percentagewise, Barefoot’s fruit equates to 0.00001272% (or \ (1.272 \times 10^ {-5} \%\)) of 2.62 trillion. That was googled, sorry the formatting sucks.
In human speak, less than a percentage of grapes harvested in California in a year go into Barefoot. A grain of sand on the beach, one grain of rice in the big bag.
Let’s credit two feet to each ton of fruit.
Again, this is imperfect in so many ways. I crushed one ton with my two feet, but also did punch downs on other wines throughout the visit. All wineries have different levels of staffing. Some punch downs are AM, some PM…
For efficacy, we will use two feet per ton. Gallo can afford it.
333,333.33 tons of grapes rounds to 333,334. We can’t round down useable fruit!
333,334 times two is 666,668.
Hence, by extremely reliable and not at all fake calculation, it would take 666,6668 feet to foot tread the grapes needed for an annual Barefoot production year.
Now who wants to calculate the labor?!
[1] **A longer process for some textural whites, orange wines and especially red wines. Some white wines are pressed and don’t necessitate punch downs
[2] #gobirds
How dare you make me enjoy thinking about math. And also, where can I stomp some grapes? It seems so cathartic.