I got tired of drinking the same six grapes.

On the second page of American Trojan, Max Nikias, who left a village in Cyprus and went on to lead the University of Southern California, writes that immigrants and refugees know “what it is like to be the underdog, to start with nothing.” I read that and recognized both sides of my own house.

My great-grandfather José Díez worked his older brother Eduardo’s bodega in Málaga until the Spanish Civil War ended it. My grandparents married there in 1949 and sailed for Venezuela the next year, and my mother was born in Caracas. My father’s line runs back through the Wombwells, the family behind Wombwell’s Travelling Menagerie, which hauled lions and elephants from fair to fair across nineteenth-century Britain. Showmen on the road were nobody’s idea of respectable, and they made a living anyway. My wife, Elvira, comes from Crimea. Her grandfather was deported from his home there, and her parents met in Uzbekistan, a long way from where the family started. Between us we carry a lot of geography and not much pedigree.

That’s how I see wine. Most of the world’s grapes have lived the same story. Phylloxera, war, Soviet planting quotas and an export market that wanted six famous names pushed hundreds of varieties to the margins. Some survived on a few hectares because a family refused to pull them up. Alicante Bouschet, the grape that started this for me, was bred in France as a cheap coloring grape, written off as a workhorse, and made something of itself in Portugal’s Alentejo.

I read Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Central Florida, then spent years teaching English to speakers of other languages and translating in Crimea, mostly helping people be understood somewhere that wasn’t theirs. Wine Underdogs is the same job. These wines have names you can’t pronounce yet, from places you might not find on a map, and I translate them: where they come from, who kept them alive, what famous wine they can replace, and how to get a bottle in America. When I score one, I opened it myself, and the tasting notes say exactly what was in the glass.

Every famous grape started as somebody’s local wine. These are the ones still waiting their turn.

Wine Underdogs belongs to Underdogs LLC, alongside a sister business, Web Underdogs, which helps wine businesses find out whether AI assistants name them and get their facts right. It doesn’t buy coverage here. If I ever write about a Web Underdogs client, the piece says so at the top.