Today’s piece comes from Charlotte Cook—a writer, traveler, and brewer who publishes the Drinking in Strange Places newsletter. Charlotte has written for Everyday Drinking about Kazakhstan cider, Asturias cider, and Bavaria’s Zoigl beer culture.

Czechia (aka the Czech Republic) is known for its big flavors. Lukr-poured beers with sturdy heads, pork knuckles that seem more like half a leg, and spicy pickled cheese all truly lead to sensory overload. Yet the Czechs also do delicate very well, and whilst the region of Moravia is the best-known Czech wine area, there are small and ancient vineyards within the city of Prague, including the botanical garden and Prague Castle itself.

A modern capital city isn’t the first place you’d think of to discover a flourishing wine industry, but Prague has 180 square meters of green space per resident, making it one of the greenest cities in Europe. The vineyards ingeniously use space that few other crops could thrive in (and would be unsuitable for recreation ) by snaking up the steep and rocky slopes leading to Prague Castle, turning what was once a defensive feature into something that can be used to bring people together.

The vines at Prague Castle were allegedly planted by St. Wenceslas himself, the very same Good King to whom the carol alludes. Although this origin story is likely apocryphal, the vineyard still bears his name. Historians now date the vineyard to the 14th century, nearly half a millennia after Wenceslas’ tenure, but the grapes were likely planted to play a role in the liturgical life of the castle.

Christianity came to central Europe with the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius (the so called Apostles of the Slavs) in the 9th century, about the same time a defensive fort was constructed where the castle now stands, and Christianity really took hold in the region. Although the vines came much later, along with development of the medieval castle, it is thought they were grown in order to make sacramental wine, to be used in the ritual of the Holy Communion.

From its medieval origins the vineyard passed through the hands of several church orders, before being sold to the wealthy Richter family in the 19th century, who both tended the vines and built a spectacular classicist-style villa above them, where today you can sample the output.

The Wenceslas vineyard has had a turbulent history. As in many parts of Europe under Communist control, the 20th century was especially unkind to the vines. Immediately following the war, the villa was taken over by the Association of Worker’s Universities, and the vines began to fall into neglect. In 1956, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic took control of the villa and the vineyard, at a time when matters of state were of greater importance than the harvest. The regime would have seen little value in the small vineyard, where collectivisation would have been impossible and its output unworthy of consideration, and so no one cared for it.

The fall of socialism, which came to Czechoslovakia in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution, allowed a return to winemaking that was not wholly controlled by the state. In 1990, the vineyard began to be tentatively restored along with Villa Richter, but it was not until 2005 that full restoration took place, to coincide with the 1,100th birthday of its namesake saint.

The restoration was overseen by Jaroslav Hykl, a Czech wine expert and now the owner of the villa and vineyard. Hykl took care to select varieties of grapes that would survive in the harsh and changeable Czech weather. Having traveled to pretty much every wine-growing region, yet having a great interest in Czech agronomy, Hykl was easily able to settle two varieties. Today the vineyard is comprised of riesling rynsky (aka Rhine riesling) from slightly further south than Prague in Slovakia, and rulandské modré (aka pinot noir) reportedly brought to Bohemia by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV around the same time the original vines were planted.

Today the 2,000 vines produce about 2,500 bottles annually. The output is so small that the only place to try wine is from the restaurant in the restored Villa Richter. From the wine pergola, overlooking the red roof tiles of the city below, you can sample the refreshing riesling, with gooseberry notes underlined by an uncommon acidity.

But the views and the wine combine to create something more complex than sampling in isolation. Here, you can drink and savor history in a city where —both inspiring and horrifying—is as much a denizen as any other inhabitant.

That said, the vineyard is very much a summer experience, as trekking up the many steps in the gloomy Czech winter doesn’t hold much appeal. There are, however, other equally as fascinating wines made within the city limits that can be enjoyed in much cozier surroundings.

Continuing the theme, the Wenceslas Wine Cooperative produces a small number of bottles in their collective vineyard, made by amateur oenologists with the support of nearby professionals at the Wilomenna Winery. Located in Prague 9 district (a trek from the city center), the small vineyard and tasting room is open throughout the winter, and produces wines using local grapes such as Moravian muscat and blauer portugieser (a red variety grown throughout central Europe).

Prague is a city that sets itself up well for winter, and with a cold wind blowing along the Vltava there plenty of warm and welcoming bars for when the fairy-tale surroundings threaten to take a slightly Brothers Grimm turn. Wine Not, a stone’s throw from the Dancing House, specializes in Czech and central European wines and has wooden beds to sprawl out on whilst you work your way through the by-the-glass menu. Similarly, Vinograf near the Charles Bridge has a grotto-like atmosphere and extensive bottle list with many Bohemian wines to choose from.

There’s something magical about drinking wine in a place like Prague. The Czech wines use the same ancient local grapes that were nearly lost to history when the Soviet-style system of agriculture took over much of central Europe. Although there is little that can be done to prise the foamy beer from the grasp of many visitors to Prague, do take a little time to seek out the less well-known wines from the city, and taste a little bit of the Czech revival alongside it.

No one really tells you what to do when you first arrive at a sagardotegi, or traditional Basque cider house, especially if you don’t speak Basque. You’re simply given a glass, led to one of the long wooden tables in a vast room, and immediately served a plate of chorizo, followed by a cod omelet. It’s left up to you to figure out how to get a drink.

My …

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The day before the wild boar hunt, we’d eaten horse meat, which was the traditional weekend lunch of chef Olivier Desaintmartin’s French childhood. Olivier had taken me along to visit the village horse butcher, his old school friend, who complained that the younger generation of French didn’t eat so much cheval anymore. The butcher blamed it on inferior supermarket horse meat, which he said came — like everything else — pre-packaged from America. “There’s also this idea that the horse is the friend of the man,” said the horse butcher.

That night, in Charleville-Mézières, near the Ardennes Forest, we drank Champagne with Olivier’s uncle Jean, who proudly showed off a local hunting magazine that had published his snapshot of a huge, bloody, dead boar he’d recently killed. “That’s what you’ll be flushing out of the bushes tomorrow,” Olivier said to me with a laugh.

Olivier is a chef who’s lived and worked in Philadelphia for decades. At his restaurants, Olivier has always insisted on bistro staples like organ meats, skate, escargots, wild duck in an antique press — and if Americans weren’t so fond of horses, he’d likely also offer viande de cheval. I’d met him when I was covering the Philadelphia restaurant scene in the mid-2000s, long before the trend of offal meats or nose-to-tail eating had gone mainstream. At that time, animal-rights activists protested outside his bistro on evenings when he offered a $5 foie gras special, shouting at diners with a bullhorn, and decrying what they saw as the barbarism of eating the diseased livers of force-fed ducks and geese. Olivier’s front window, on which he wrote “Foie Gras!” in precious, Frenchy hand lettering, was occasionally smashed by vandals.

In those days, Olivier often waxed nostalgic for the elemental, primal roots of the cooking he knew back in hardscrabble Picardy — rustic and earthy, based on things like beets, turnips, endives, leeks, foraged mushrooms, stinky Maroilles cheese, so-called “pre-salted” lamb (“they graze on salt marshes”), and lots of game, particularly boar. Olivier was convinced people would love a cookbook about this cuisine, and so one autumn he invited me to go on a wild boar hunt with his uncle.

On the morning of the hunt, when Olivier and Uncle Jean showed up at the hotel before dawn, Jean wore his brimmed hat cocked to one side, and with his trimmed mustache looked a little like Ernest Hemingway. “I’ve been up early salting the lamb for lunch!” Olivier said.

I was still full of horse and hungover from all the Champagne. “I thought the lamb was pre-salted,” I said.

The sun rose as we arrived at the meeting spot in the forest, the ground thick with frost. Two dozen hunters gathered around in a semicircle, receiving instructions from the hunt master. No blaze orange or camouflage for these guys. They dressed in spiffy outfits, most opting for tweed caps or berets. Some wore fancy scarves. One guy wore a cape. The hunt master explained where some boars had been spotted the other day, and also pointed out the forest was full of deer. We munched on galette au sucre as horns blew and the dogs barked inside their kennel.

“Where are our guns?” I asked. Olivier laughed and handed me a fluorescent yellow vest.

“They’re not giving us guns,” he said. “Today, we are traqueurs.”

This meant our job would be to walk through the woods, crashing through the low-lying brush, shouting, and generally trying to flush wild boars out of hiding. Meanwhile, two dozen hunters would stand ready to shoot. I was thankful when I heard the hunt master tell them, “No one is to shoot directly into the forest.”

They released the dogs and we traqueurs followed them into the woods as the hunters took their positions. The head traqueur told us to advance together in a line, at arm’s length, so none of us would accidentally be shot.

We were a motley bunch. I was positioned next to a tough-looking bald guy wearing a ridiculously tiny knit cap that didn’t cover his ears. On my other side was a woman with her hair dyed neon pink — honestly, a pretty good style decision for a traqueur, given the safety concerns.

An odd camaraderie developed as we wandered through the forest, waving our arms like idiots, growling “Ho!” I learned that the other traqueurs were mostly local people who were looking to pick up a little extra cash on the weekend. Some of the people gathered chanterelle mushrooms that grew on the forest floor. The hunters, meanwhile, were mostly wealthy, privileged, middle-aged men. So being a traqueur was sort of like caddying, except of course you might be shot.

As the morning wore on, we could sometimes hear the snorts of boar and would catch a whiff of their musky smell, but we had no luck flushing any. A few times we flushed deer, and some of us would yell, “À la houe! Derrière!” and within seconds we’d hear the crack of gunfire.

After a few hours, everyone regrouped in the clearing and we took a break for lunch. This was when the real class system of the hunt revealed itself.

The traqueurs lit a makeshift bonfire, unwrapped sandwiches, and sat down on logs for lunch. The hunters, meanwhile, set up at long, covered picnic tables. Since we were with Uncle Jean, we were upgraded and invited to the hunters’ lunch. We ate the pre-salted lamb and lentils and vegetable potage. Other hunters grilled sirloin au poivre and tripe. There were meat tourtes and pâté. There was lots of red wine. I asked why the hunters and the traqueurs had to eat separately, and someone said, “Well, you know, you don’t wash the towels with the rags.”

As we finished our lunch, a group of traqueurs came over to the hunters’ side and — genuinely offended — insisted that Olivier and I come join them. The traqueurs had broken open a bottle of local moonshine called bistouille and were drinking shots. They insisted we join in, too. “You had better be careful,” Olivier told me.

The bald guy with the tiny knit cap, in particular, kept passing us the bottle, trying to get us drunk. After a few good-comrade sips, Olivier and I just pretended to swig from the bottle. This bistouille burned. The bald guy, on the other hand, kept tossing back the firewater.

Soon enough, the hunters were eager to find a postprandial boar to shoot, and called for us traqueurs to trudge back into the forest. The first area we flushed after lunch included a steep hill that went up several hundred feet. After all the wine and bistouille, it seemed somewhat discourteous, or even sadistic, of the hunters. At that point, the ways I might die on the boar hunt seemed to be mounting.

All of the traqueurs appeared to be in bad shape when we finally arrived at the hilltop, but the bald guy with the tiny knit cap was in the worst shape. He swayed back and forth, holding onto a tree. He tried to stand and fell forward, head over heels, nearly a hundred feet down the hill. After that, he couldn’t get up at all and laid back down in wet leaves. Olivier and another traqueur dragged him, on his ass, to the bottom of the hill and left him lying on the trail. His dog stood guard nearby, not letting anyone else near its drunken owner.

We continued waving our arms and shouting. We continued to hear and smell boar. But all we seemed to be flushing was deer. “À la houe! Derrière!”

Finally, we neared the end of the last flush and stepped into the clearing. I could see the line of hunters, guns trained. Suddenly, directly in front of me, a deer popped up and broke into a sprint. “À la houe!” someone shouted. With the deer directly in front of me, this was my first thought: The hunters won’t shoot into the forest. Second thought: I am not in the forest. I am in the clearing, and therefore I will be shot. Panic immediately set in. And without thinking, I lunged headfirst back into the woods. It was the lunge of a coward, yet the hunters seemed to be impressed. They mistakenly believed I was diving to catch the deer.

No one ended up shooting a boar that afternoon.

Afterward, over cocktails in the hunt lodge, there was much bemused talk about the barbaric American who had tried to tackle a deer and wrestle him to the ground with his bare hands. “You are a cowboy!” they said.

Following the hunt, we joined the rest of Uncle Jean’s family at a rustic hilltop auberge for dinner. Heads of wild boar lined the walls. Dinner was, unsurprisingly, game. In this case, we were served grives, or thrush. Tiny birds cooked whole and served in a sage butter sauce. We dove in, little heads and beaks first.

In the middle of dinner, a woman at the next table became short of breath. She seemed to be experiencing a heart attack. Uncle Jean calmly stood to help, and her dining companions laid her down on the ground in the middle of the dining room. The waitress phoned an ambulance. About 45 minutes later, the ambulance finally arrived, with the most nonchalant paramedics I have ever witnessed strolling into the dining room — one stubbing out a cigarette. They offered the woman a cup of water and sat her on a stretcher.

The chef, furious that this was happening during his Saturday dinner rush, kept poking his head out of the kitchen. “Did she die yet?” he hissed at his staff.

After dinner, as we prepared to leave, Uncle Jean introduced the chef to Olivier, explaining that his nephew “owns a French restaurant in Philadelphia.”

“Pfffffft,” the chef said, a classic French mouth fart, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Ah,” he said. “It’s barbaric over there, no?”

More Travel Adventures in Everyday Drinking

Back in June, Pico Iyer published an essay in the New York Times entitled, “The Travel Writer’s Dilemma: Share, or Gatekeep?” In that piece, Iyer explores the conundrum facing those of us who write about the cities we love. “Destinations are fragile, on several fronts,” he writes, “many can’t bear the weight of thousands.” Iyer asks a pressing question facing travel publishing: In an over-touristed world, should we broadcast our discoveries, our “hidden gems,” our special places, or hide them away?

As soon as a secret gets widely distributed, it’s a secret no longer. That “hidden treasure” I’m so eager to tell you about becomes a lot less hidden, and less of a treasure, the moment I share it.

What’s a travel writer to do? The very premise of the job is to tell you about attractive possibilities that you might not otherwise know about. But as those little-known jewels become better known, readers grow understandably indignant (that quiet and reasonably priced cafe is suddenly unquiet and unreasonably priced), while locals wonder how much to curse the onslaught of visitors and how much to try to make the most of them.

Iyer mostly talks about his adopted home of Kyoto. But he also touches on my beloved Barcelona, similarly overrun with tourists:

Now a mention of a “secret” bar in Barcelona may reach 11 million readers in every corner of the planet, many of whom are on their way to Spain very soon — or at least know of others who will be.

I touched on the tourism problem in Barcelona last month in my essay “The Wine Drinker as Flânuer”:

I was an overprivileged visitor in Barcelona, an over-touristed city—and a city whose residents are fed up with the tourist deluge. So much so that hundreds of people recently took to Barcelona’s streets for anti-tourism demonstrations that included chants of “tourists go home” and spraying visitors with water guns. Two particular flashpoints are cruise ships (depositing 1.6 million day trippers a year onto La Rambla and into the Gothic quarter) and Airbnb (for which Barcelona intends to revoke all existing licenses in 2028).

In fact, I was one of those visitors renting an Airbnb, on the top floor of a building in Poble Sec with a nice terrace and a lovely view of Montjuïc. When I told a Catalan friend (whom I call the Catalan Poet) that I wanted to buy an apartment like the Airbnb I was renting, she eyed me silently for a moment as she rolled a cigarette. We were drinking vermouth outside a bar called Garbí, crowded with off-duty taxi drivers, and named after a hot wind that blows from the Sahara and allegedly drives people mad. The Catalan Poet had just attended an anti-gentrification protest in her working-class neighborhood of Sants. After she lit her cigarette and took a drag, she told me the only way she would approve of my “contribution to the gentrification” would be if I learned Catalan.

So, this is my dilemma in writing about Barcelona. I want to share my favorite spots with you, dear reader, I do. And yet, when I do, I run the risk of swelling the crowds at the places I enjoy—many of which are small, with limited seating and bar space.

This is not a silly debate over what’s “local” and what’s “touristy.” That’s begging the wrong question. Barcelona is already full of tourists—but so is Paris, New York, Lisbon, Reykjavík, and many other places that people enjoy. Everyone knows that the best places in the world must strike a precarious balance. Geoff Dyer talks about this phenomenon in his travel book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. Dyer discusses his favorite bar in Rome, the San Calisto:

Restaurants and resorts often boast of their “exclusive” status, but most of the world’s best places are the opposite of exclusive—and nowhere was less exclusive than the Calisto. The Calisto made a prison look exclusive. It wasn’t just that everyone was welcome; everyone was actually there. Heroin addicts, film directors, journalists, models, garbage collectors, tourists, drunks, nutters, doctors, waiters from other bars that had already closed—they all ended up at the Calisto.

In Barcelona, when I think about places that are both touristy and local, I think of a place like Quimet & Quimet, a classic tapas bar in the Poble Sec neighborhood that’s been open since 1914. It’s a closet-sized space that can only fit about 20 people, standing up, enjoying house vermouth, sparkling wine, and great tapas based on conservas—the apricots topped with creamy cheese and anchovies is amazing, as is the tuna belly, sea urchin, and a dish that’s a slab of brie with artichoke, piquillo pepper, and caviar.

Quimet & Quimet is not a secret spot at all, and teeters on the edge of being lost to tourism—at lunchtime and in the evening, the line stretches down the block. But if you happen to time it right—say just at noon, before the typical lunch hours, or just before 10 pm, well after the tourists have eaten—the experience can be magical. A lot of contemporary Barcelona can be like this (don’t worry, Quimet & Quimet is probably the most touristy place I will mention).

Since a lot of the places I mention below are still uncrowded, like Quimet & Quimet was 15 or 20 years ago, I’m attempting to strike a balance here between sharing and gatekeeping. Some of this is straightforward. I’m putting all of my recommendations behind a paywall. That means that 95% of my readers—the ones who do not pay for my newsletter—won’t be seeing them unless they upgrade to paid. This eases my conscience and my own impact on the over-tourism of Barcelona.

And I am totally gatekeeping three of my absolute favorite places—two neighborhood restaurant/bars in Poble Sec and one late night bar in Gràcia. I will share these, however, with my Founding Members, and so feel free to upgrade for those.

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My Guide to Drinking & Eating in Barcelona

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From steep mountains to radioactive lakes to vast grassy plains, landlocked Kazakhstan is a vast and fascinating county. As the world’s ninth largest nation, it is bigger than most of Europe. But it’s still largely unknown by outsiders—many of whom, unfortunately, still tend to think of Borat as their first cultural reference point for the country.

As a …

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I still like to the read the paper version of the New York Times on Sundays. This is partly because I am an old-school newspaper person. But it’s also because I like to see how various articles (some of which I’ve already read online during the week) are presented by the Times editors. I’…

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There’s a saying in Cremonese dialect: En piàt de marubéen el fa resusitàa àan i mòort—“a plate of marubini can bring the dead back to life.” Marubini is the stuffed pasta of Cremona, the province in Lombardia along the Po River where I lived when I was 19. Marubini are plump little rings similar to tortellini, …

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Charlotte Cook, acclaimed brewer and creator of the Drinking in Strange Places newsletter, returns to Everyday Drinking to contribute a series on beer cultures around the world. Charlotte has been named among the top female brewers in the UK by Drinks Business and has worked at Coalition Brewing in London, Pohjala in Estonia, Cloudwater

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Our latest travel guide comes from Italy-based writer Gillian Longworth McGuire, whose travel newsletter, Gillian Knows Best, is an amazing resource, with especially in-depth guides to Rome and Venice. Everyday Drinking’s travel guides—to places like Madrid, Loire Valley, Oaxaca, and elsewhere—are for paid subscribers only.

When I first moved to Rome I knew zero things about Italian wine. Mark and I had spent the previous 8 years visiting vineyards on the windswept western cape and at the foothills of the Franschhoek mountains in South Africa. I brought bottles of Pinotage and Methode Cap Classique with me to Rome. I just unpacked the last of those bottles, now important vintages, that we bought decades ago with the intention being to open them on big occasions. They have not been well stored over the years, not to mention their most recent year+ in a warehouse near the Rome airport. Maybe I can make some amazing vinegar? Before my time in Southern Africa I drank Saint-Émilion that I bought at the Score grocery store in Niamey, Niger. Why I was drinking red wine gown in Bordeaux in a country where the temperatures averaged between 87F and 105F (31C and 41C) I have no idea. I was 23. I probably liked the label.

Over the years in Italy I have learned a lot. I studied Super Tuscans in a classroom underneath the Spanish Steps and spent afternoons in Umbria and Tuscany tasting Chianti and Sangiovese. I have had rough house wine in simple trattorias deep in the Lazio countryside. In Verona I discovered that Lambrusco is delicious. It was the staff at Trattoria Penestri and Marigold who introduced me to natural wines that didn’t taste of sulfur. Once I helped with the Vendemmia of rare biancolella grapes on a cliff with a view of Palmarola. Last month I got to see one of the smallest vineyards in Venice.

These are the places I go to in Rome to drink a glass of Cesanese (my favorite red with amatriciana) and share a bottle of pecorino (the perfect white for a beachy summer lunch.) These are the places I buy wine to bring to dinner parties and to stock my own shelves.

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I’m excited to share the news that this essay (published last spring) was selected for The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 (the anthology that ironically replaces my former series The Best American Travel Writing). Thanks to Padma Lakshmi and Jaya Saxena for selecting it.

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By the time I arrived for dinner at Simianer Spargelhof, on the outskirts of Hambrücken, I was fully in the grip of asparagus fever. All afternoon, I had been following part of the 84-mile Baden-Württemberg asparagus trail, stopping at tiny roadside markets marked by giant plastic white asparagus and hand-painted signs announci…

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It was early evening in Barcelona—that wonderful time in Spain when work is over, but the sun is out, and dinner is still a few hours away. I lounged outside a trendy bar called Morro Fi, drinking vermouth, over ice, and nibbling olives, potato chips, and convervas, those tinned fish that are such a delicacy in Iberia.

Morro…

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Our latest travel guide comes from Venice-based writer Gillian Longworth McGuire, whose travel newsletter, Gillian Knows Best, is an amazing resource for all things Italian, with especially in-depth guides to Rome. For paid subscribers who want an even deeper dive into where to eat and drink in Venice, we have also published Gillian’s comprehensive city guide. Click below.

Venice In Ten Spritzes

—Gillian Longworth McGuire

On a bitterly cold January morning many years ago over our morning cappuccino, Noah and I declared that we were going to attempt to have ten spritzes in one day. Venice has a similar elastic and disorienting sense of time and place as another beloved place of mine. Like a late morning Sazerac at the Carousel Bar in New Orleans, in Venice it can be perfectly acceptable to have a shot of grappa with your morning coffee or a 10:00 am prosecco with a gaggle of gondoliers. We didn’t hit our goal that day but we sure had fun trying. 

Not sure exactly what a spritz is? The history is fuzzy but the cocktail’s origins are Austro-Hungarian and date back to when the Empire invaded and occupied the Veneto region. A spritz is a low-alcohol mix of equal parts bitter liquor, prosecco, and sparkling water. The Venetians sometimes leave out the splash of sparkling water or swap out the prosecco for white wine. They almost always include a speared olive. 

You have four main commercial choices for the bitter liquor part; Select, Campari, Cynar, and Aperol. If you are a spritz expert, look for the locally produced Amaro Nostrano or try specialty spritzes like the saffron spritz at the Orient Experience in the Ghetto or the house spritz made with natural prosecco and lagoon bitters before dinner at Al Vecio Portal. I became a big fan of the spritz bianco this summer. It is the perfect low-alcohol drink that leaves out the bitter and is made with prosecco, sparkling water, and a slice of lemon. 

Select is Venetian so that is often the one I ask for. (Select was originally brewed in the Sestieri of Castello, where I live). It has an intense red color and notes of juniper berries and rhubarb. If you like Campari, try Select. Cynar is made with artichokes and has a less vibrant color and a bitter, earthy bite. Aperol is the sweetest and the most well-known with an orangy vanilla flavor. I am not a fan of this arguably photogenic choice. I agree with my pal Hank and think that it tastes a little like that fluoride rinse at the dentist.

You drink a spritz before, not with a meal. You will almost always get a bowl of potato chips and maybe some peanuts with your spritz, but you should also follow the Venetians and try some cichetti, plates of small snacks that are eaten before lunch or dinner. 

Another important thing to know about Venice is you walk. A lot. More than think you will even if you regularly hit your 10,000 steps a day. Most bacaro, the traditional bars that serve wine, spritz, and cichetti are standing room only. Almost all of my picks have a place to sit down. To help you plan your stops every few thousand steps or so I created this guide to some of my favorite places to have a spritz in Venice. Perfect for just about any time of day.

One last piece of advice: Don’t go to one of those kiosks and get a spritz to go in a plastic cup. Pretty please.

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As wonderful as my favorite restaurant in Venice is you can’t eat every meal at Al Covo. They are closed two days a week, after all. Last month during our unexpected extended stay in Venice, I used the time to expand my horizons beyond my firm favorites. I tried some splashy new names and some places that had long been on the to-do list.

Venice is a comp…

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This travel guide comes from Madrid-based writer François Monti, author of several books, including his most recent, Mueble Bar, as well as the cocktail newsletter, Jaibol.

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I talk about the Finger Lakes fairly regularly in Everyday Drinking. I just mentioned one of my favorite FLX producers, Forge Cellars, just a couple of weeks ago. Before that, I published my travel guide to region’s cider trail (I consider the Finger Lakes to be the premier cider region in America). And I recommended cabernet franc and riesling from Forge, Nathan Kendall, and Bloomer Creek for Thanksgiving last year.

But with fall just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about how lovely September and October in the Finger Lakes can be. If you’ve never been, I urge you to go this fall. Seneca Lake, where I am recommending for your wine tour, is roughly a five-hour drive from either New York and Philadelphia.

For years, people have been talking about the Finger Lakes as an “up and coming” wine region, but I think that kind of talk is too diminishing. The Finger Lakes may be the best cool-climate wine region in America, full stop. And the wine value you can find for $25 to $30 per bottle is incredible. Below are my top ten (ok, 11) wineries to visit, along with some suggestions for where to eat, drink, and stay.

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It was a strange siesta. After a late lunch of black olives, jamón Iberico, manchego cheese and a half bottle of the local red in the hot July sun, I’d nodded off on the balcony of the apartment I was renting, which overlooked the town square of Haro, in the heart of northern Spain’s La Rioja region. Thumping electronic music and someone shouting into a microphone startled me awake. In my fog of slumber, the pulsing music sounded like a siren, the urgent voice calling people to action. It alarmed me. What could be happening? Certainly, the coronavirus’s delta variant had been ravaging Spain at that moment, but I was unaware of any civil unrest.

As I gained my senses, I peered over the balcony. It was just a few dozen people in workout clothes, pedaling stationary bikes in front of the town hall, while Peloton instructors loudly encouraged them to pedal faster. All around them in the square, other residents of Haro, with face masks under their chins, calmly nibbled their tapas and sipped their wine at crowded bars and cafes. Others, properly masked, strolled the square as masked kids ran around and kicked soccer balls. It was 7 p.m., and the sun was still bright and warm.

I felt silly, but this was my fifth day of isolation after testing positive for the coronavirus, and my brain was running wild with crazy scenarios. After nearly two glorious Spanish weeks, I’d had to get a coronavirus test in the days before my flight home. The idea of becoming infected after vaccination was new and unclear, and so I was floored when the nurse at the clinic where I tested showed me that I was positive. Since my trip had to be extended, I rented an Airbnb and was now having an isolated siesta by myself for days on end.

I’d had only very mild symptoms. Then, on Day 2, I bit into the jamón and couldn’t taste it. I swirled and sniffed my wine and realized I couldn’t smell it. All my senses returned perfectly fine by Day 3, but during those 24 hours I had composed an entire book in my mind about the food and wine writer who’d lost his ability to taste or smell.

This summer trip was my first since the pandemic had begun. When the European Union opened its doors to fully vaccinated Americans in late June 2021, I caught the first flight I could, on the 4th of July. When I had originally planned this trip two years before, my idea was to write about the state of the Spanish siesta. Like many outsiders, I’ve always been fascinated by the daily schedule in Spain: work from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., complete shutdown of work for at least two hours, work again from 4 p.m. to about 8, dinner no earlier than 10, bed after midnight, repeat.

Pundits had been declaring the death of the siesta for more than 20 years. At the start of 2006, the New York Times, reporting that Spain’s central government ended the two- to three-hour midday break for its workers (“For many in Spain, siesta ends”), declared: “they will be forced to abandon a tradition that has typified Spanish life for decades.” A decade later, the siesta persisted as a sacred afternoon ritual. In 2015, it was big news when the mayor of a village near Valencia issued an official edict that all shops, offices and bars must be closed, and residents must not make any noise, from 2 to 5 p.m., to “guarantee everybody’s rest and thus better deal with the rigors of the summer.”

Still, speculation over the siesta’s fate continued. In 2016, when Spain’s prime minister tried to stop the workday at 6 p.m., the BBC asked, “The end of the Spanish siesta?” The news outlet doubled down a year later, declaring, “It’s time to put the tired Spanish siesta stereotype to bed.” A year before the pandemic, the Guardian dissected the issue (“Siesta no more? Why Spanish sleeping habits are under strain”). The newspaper spoke to a man who was president of a group called the National Commission for the Rationalization of Spanish Schedules, which campaigned to end the split working day and revert to Greenwich Mean Time. Apparently, in a quirk of history, Spain remains in the “wrong” time zone, dating to when the fascist dictator Gen. Francisco Franco moved the nation’s clocks forward an hour in solidarity with Nazi Germany during World War II. Which is why the Spanish sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 p.m. in midsummer.

Yet in 2021, if the siesta was supposedly dying, I saw little evidence. Shops and businesses shut down at 2 p.m. and reopened at 4, just like always. Some Spanish friends told me that, if anything, the pandemic—with its lockdowns and working from home and narrowing of the world—had led to a rekindling of their relationship with the siesta.

After the initial shock and scramble of travel logistics, I gave in to the rhythm of the isolated days. I loved watching the daily routines of the town from a distance. How the cycle of temperatures governed the day in the cafes below, people sipping coffee in the cool early morning, bustling through the first part of the workday, and then a stillness in the stifling hot midafternoon, only to come back to raucous life at twilight. Then, around midnight, as the bars closed and the square quieted down, a cool wind always seemed to blow into town.

My suddenly quiet nights were quite a different experience from my other dozen or so trips to Spain. On those trips, at that hour, I might only be finishing dinner, sipping a gin and tonic in a giant balloon wine glass, and getting ready to head out into the night. More than a few times over the years, I’d found myself behind a bar at 3 a.m., mixing cocktails for a crowd of new friends. Like many American men visiting Spain, I was perhaps channeling a boozy, aging Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night.”

Coincidentally, the only book on the apartment’s shelves was something called Hemingway Traveler, a flimsy tourism paperback published in Spanish, Basque and English, full of the author’s crusty, dusty, machismo quotes and photos of his travels in northern Spain. I flipped through it quickly and tossed it aside, profoundly uninterested. Probably for too many years of my life, as a traveler and a writer, I followed what Hemingway wrote a little too closely. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, and 50 years old, it seemed ridiculous or irrelevant, or worse. I didn’t want to kill the night, or anything else. I just wanted to eat tapas and nap. An endless siesta seemed perfect.

Before my isolation in Haro, I’d spent the previous 10 days with my friend François, a writer who lives in Madrid. François is Belgian, but his wife, Rosa, is Spanish, and he’s lived in Spain for many years. When I arrived in Madrid, I realized that Rosa, a teacher, was off on a summer holiday with their daughter at her family’s village near the southern coast. “I’m a bachelor this week,” François said. “Estoy de Rodríguez.”

In Spain, when a man says, “Estoy de Rodríguez,” it means that he is home alone while his wife and children are elsewhere on vacation. It’s a corny, dated, idiomatic expression that roughly means “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Some say it dates to a mostly forgotten 1965 comedy, The Hot Summer of Mr. Rodríguez, in which a husband dreams of an extramarital affair while his wife is on vacation. That film is sappy and chaste (made during Franco-era censorship), but a racier follow-up came along in 1975, Tres Suecas Para Tres Rodríguez (“Three Swedes for Three Rodríguezes”), in which three dudes whose wives go on vacation … hang out with three Swedish women. Not exactly a classic.

The idea of François being “de Rodríguez” came up as a joke one evening while we ate the most amazing jamón and sardines at a crowded corner bar. Our other friend Abraham was leading us on a tapas crawl. “This is sacred,” Abraham said. “When a man calls his friend and says he is ‘de Rodríguez,’ that friend needs to clear his schedule and go out with you.”

The only agenda for these Three Rodríguezes, however, was a deep dive into tapas and a galaxy of drinks and food you get only at Spanish bars. At Casa Camacho, we had yayos (a cocktail with vermouth, a little gin and a fizzy soda) along with patatas bravas. At Casa Julio, we had amazing croquetas and vermouth from the tap. At Asturian spots like Perlora and Casa Parrondo, we had young Cabrales cheese and mussels to go with the cider. At a sherry bar called La Venencia, we had amontillado sherry and olives. All along the way, there were countless tiny cañas of beer to wash down more sardines, more manchego, more jamón.

“Bars are the best thing about living in Spain,” said François. “Yes, the climate is nice, it’s affordable, safe, and life is easy. But still, it’s the bars that are the best part.”

In July, Covid-19 did not appear to be dampening the buzz at Madrid’s tapas bars, which had been shut down during the worst of the pandemic. People dutifully wore their masks on the street, but once inside the bar they felt free to take them off. The only nod to the pandemic seemed to be that the government had prohibited people from crowding around the bar itself. But most places just moved tables in front of the bar, and so people crowded around those instead. Plates of toothpicked snacks continued to be handed over the bar and consumed while standing up. Those toothpicks and napkins soon ended up tossed on the floor, just like always in Spain, which never ceases to be mildly surprising at first.

I was still adjusting to the midday heat in Madrid. The evening tapas crawl had followed a shorter one earlier that day, during the hot siesta hours. François and I met an older friend of his, Alberto, for a short pre-lunch crawl of three bars. Alberto was a linguist in his late 60s, an expert in Arabic, sporting a big bushy white mustache and a blazer even though the heat was stifling. I was dressed in shorts and still sweated through my shirt.

Alberto talked about his time as a bartender at a popular spot during La Movida, the wild, hedonistic countercultural movement in Madrid during the post-Franco 1970s and 1980s. He also regaled us with tales of Tangier, Morocco, where he spends part of the year and owns a home. Alberto seemed like the kind of worldly gentleman I could see modeling my own golden years after.

Then, the vibe suddenly changed when he seemed to realize I was wearing shorts. “If I owned a bar, I would not allow anyone in who was wearing short trousers,” he said to François, who laughed at me. François happened to also be wearing a blazer and long pants. No offense, Alberto said, “but it’s not about the heat. It’s about dressing the part.” For Alberto there was a certain date every year, in late summer, when he allows himself to stop wearing socks for a brief period. Other than that, he believed a man should be fully dressed, including a jacket.

“But it’s so hot,” I said.

“Well, that’s what the siesta is for,” François said.

François and I plotted a road trip that would take us to Spain’s northeast, to La Rioja and Basque Country. The original plan had been to go to Pamplona for the famous Festival of San Fermín and its annual running of the bulls. Even though I knew Pamplona would be a ridiculous touristy mess of Hemingway-induced testosterone and role-playing, I figured I should see the spectacle once in my life. But months before my trip, San Fermín and the bullfights had been canceled for the second year in a row (the last time the festival had been canceled for consecutive years was during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s). No bulls for us.

Before I left Madrid, I visited the Prado Museum, alone, while François did some work. The Prado is one of the world’s greatest art museums, full of grand masterpieces by Goya, Velázquez, El Greco, Rubens, Titian, Bosch and countless others.

There I came across Juan Sánchez Cotán’s “Still Life With Game, Vegetables and Fruit,” a strange painting from 1602 depicting a cupboard with small birds attached to a cane, three lemons, seven apples, a goldfinch, a sparrow, two partridges and a white thistle-like vegetable called a cardoon — all set against a deep black background. Cotán is considered the inventor of the Spanish bodegón painting, simple, austere still lifes of pantry items. Only six of his paintings still exist. The objects in the painting, according to the audio tour on my headphones, “are precise and sober, and at the same time, poetic and strange. They highlight everyday simplicity.”

I spent a long time looking at the piece. Something about Cotán’s life story connected with me. In his 40s, one year after he painted that still life, the artist had some sort of midlife crisis. We don’t know why — though, apparently, a bunch of people owed him money for paintings. Whatever the reason, in 1603, he closed his workshop, renounced the world and entered a Carthusian monastery, where he lived a life of solitude, silence and contemplation.

After a few hours at the Prado, it was nearing 2 p.m. While the museum is an institution that remains open during the siesta, I had to meet François for lunch. So, I walked over to a nearby restaurant called Angelita, where he was waiting for me.

François insisted we order tomatoes as our first course. “These are the best tomatoes you will ever eat in your life,” he insisted. There are not many times in life where someone says something so hyperbolic and it turns out to be true. That two-hour lunch was among the most memorable meals I have eaten in the past several years. And those tomatoes! They were a variety called Corazón de Buey that were grown in Zamora at the family farm of Angelita’s owners. They were so red, so meaty, so juicy, that one bite brought tears to my eyes.

Is it ridiculous to say that the most exciting, inspiring thing I did in Spain was eat a tomato? Hemingway certainly would not have been impressed. But in that moment, I reflected on what the audio tour in the Prado had said about the 17th-century still lifes, that “one could see the creative hand of God in even the most trivial of objects.”

François and I hit the road the next morning. We eventually drove along the Basque coast, eating a breakfast of bonito washed down with txakoli wine, then a lunch of txuleta steaks with Rioja, then cruised up into the hills above San Sebastián to the village of Astigarraga, and sampled crisp Basque ciders straight out of the tanks at a cidery called Zapiain.

We traveled into the Basque green foothills for lunch at Asador Etxebarri, set in a rustic stone house and run by chef Victor Arguinzoniz, who grills everything on the menu — and who, as the story goes, fell in love with the magic of fire as a child because his family house had no electricity or gas and they cooked on an open hearth. There is nothing secret about Asador Etxebarri — it was recently voted the third-best restaurant in the world by a panel of more than 1,000 experts, and has been talked about in most of the world’s food media.

Still, this was a culinary pilgrimage for François and me. For over three hours we were served more than a dozen courses, including the platonic ideal of chorizo, sardines, prawns, razor clams, goose barnacles and a whole red bream. The steak that came as the last course seemed, as François said, “like our reward for making it through the meal.” Despite the grandeur of the lunch, the thing that jumped out to me was a mind-bending dish of grilled eggplant. Eggplant! How could something so simple and humble be so masterfully presented? Cotán would have been impressed.

During that gluttonous blur of days, there was so much movement and eating that we barely took the time for a siesta. We headed south into Rioja, Spain’s most famous wine region, and visited a winemaker named Sandra Bravo in Villabuena, a village of just 300 residents but around 40 wineries. Sandra, whose winery Sierra de Toloño is among an exciting new generation in Rioja, is committed to organic farming, low-intervention winemaking and growing grapes at high altitudes, over 2,000 feet in elevation. The reason for this was obvious during the hot summer days in Rioja. “Now with climate change, everyone is climbing the mountains,” she said. Sandra took us to one of her favorite vineyards, planted more than 100 years ago. The terrace above the vineyard was ringed by huge ancient stone slabs, which she called the “Agnostic Cemetery.” She told us that, as she worked alone there, she felt a certain spirituality she couldn’t quite explain. I also felt something there among those vines, something similar to what I felt in the Prado and while eating those tomatoes and eggplants.

In the evening, we made a tapas crawl through Rioja’s capital city, Logroño. Here, crowds flock to more than 100 tiny bars in a two-block area of downtown for the small plates known as pintxos, and wine. Our guide was Pedro Barrio, a local dentist who also happens to be president of the Rioja Academy of Gastronomy. He led us to Calle del Laurel, the epicenter. There’s certainly a lot of tapas in Spain, but even here, Calle del Laurel stands out.

Our first stop was a place called Bar Soriano, serving only grilled wild mushrooms in a garlicky butter sauce and topped with a skewered shrimp. From there, Pedro intended for us get more adventurous pintxos. Our next stop was Bar El Perchas, which sold two pintxos: pig’s ear in a spicy sauce and a fried pig’s ear sandwich. I couldn’t help but laugh: Where else besides Spain could a bar exist with a menu of two pig’s ear dishes?

At Bar Donosti, we ordered a dish of quail egg, chorizo and spicy pepper called cojonudos (the name means “ballsy,” a compliment) followed by baby lamb intestine. On Calle del Laurel the crowd continued to grow until it was packed wall-to-wall. Sure, everyone wore masks, but still. I said to the bartender at Bar Donosti, “It’s like there’s not even a pandemic.” He shrugged and said, “It’s Spain. Spain is different.”

At the end of the evening, Pedro took us to a private club owned by his wife’s family, housed in a building right in the center of the tapas epicenter. He opened a bottle of Rioja while we looked at the wall, every inch covered with bullfight memorabilia: old posters and black-and-white photos of famous bullfighters, their colorful costumes, swords and bandilleras. For someone who’d read so much Hemingway as a younger person, it was all so oddly familiar. As we drank wine in this room, it struck me just how strange it is that Americans like me know so much about bullfighting and a certain take on Spain through our literature — and so little about so many other things in the world.

In the morning, I once again felt like we needed to do something besides eating and drinking, something at least mildly active. There was an option to go horseback riding, but that was out of the question — I am deathly and irrationally afraid of horses. A bicycle tour seemed a nice alternative, and one winery, called Bodegas Lecea in the village of San Asensio, offered electric bike tours. Even easier, I thought. Since François was a little hung over, I didn’t mention anything to him about the electric bike tour.

It was only when we arrived and our guide, Estela, handed us helmets that François looked at me in horror and informed me that he didn’t know how to ride a bike. Estela couldn’t understand François’ reticence and hopped on her bike and took off down the hill. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked François, then also began pedaling. Behind me, about 30 seconds later, I heard François shout and turned around to see him falling and crashing the electric bike. I explained to Estela that François would be sitting this one out. When I returned an hour later from the tour, François said, “Next time, we ride horses. Like real men.”

It was a few days later, after François had returned to his life and responsibilities in Madrid — no longer de Rodríguez— that I tested positive. During my siesta isolation in Haro, I left the apartment only twice. Once, triple-masked, to stock up on food and wine at the store. The other, on Day 7, in a fit of cabin fever, I walked directly to my rental car and drove to the outskirts of town. Alone, under the midday sun, I hiked the Hondón Trail, a path along a meandering section of the Ebro River. No electric bikes, no horses. Just my own two feet.

My destination was first a medieval necropolis, and then the remains of a Celtic temple. The Celts made wine here long before the Romans arrived. And before them, the Phoenicians, who arrived around 1200 B.C., tended their grape vines. But there was civilization here long before that. All along the Basque side of the Ebro valley, there is a series of dolmen, huge stone tombs built 3,000 to 6,000 years ago, as well as the remains of an entire Neolithic village. Outside the village of Elvillar sits La chabola de la Hechicera—the Witch’s Hut—a 3,000-year-old mini-Stonehenge of huge stone slabs where, legend has it, a witch can be heard singing on the morning of midsummer’s day.

I stopped for a long time at the ancient hilltop Celtic temple, overlooking the vast spread of vineyards under the sweltering sun, with human-made indentations in the rock that archaeologists believe were sacrificial pools. It felt deeply spiritual. The time spent in isolation, in a foreign country, on this pandemic-era trip, was changing me. Once upon a time, looking across the Ebro Valley or observing a quiet Spanish square, I would have remembered a pithy quote from Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” or “The Sun Also Rises,” but not now. Instead, I thought about something a septuagenarian winemaker had told François and me the week before. “At best, you have only 30 or 40 harvests in your life,” the winemaker said. “What keeps me alive is that I’m always looking for the best harvest of my life. But, of course, the best harvest never comes.”

The next morning, I drove to a clinic in Bilbao to be tested again. This time: negative. I could now return home whenever I wanted. I was so relieved that I could physically feel the stress leave my body, my muscles loosen. I returned to Haro and stopped at a winery, López de Heredia, ordered a half bottle of red wine and a plate of jamón and olives, and sat in the sunshine, enjoying my freedom from the virus.

I was happy. I felt extremely fortunate to be alive and healthy, with all my senses intact. I felt very lucky to be a vaccinated American traveling in Spain, eating Spanish food, drinking Spanish wine, being on a crazy Spanish schedule, estoy de Rodríguez. Though I wasn’t the same young, adventure-seeking traveler that I may have been in years past, I felt a sense of peace about that as well. That afternoon, I took a long, deep, satisfying siesta.

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