The wine bars worth a detour in Europe

There is a certain kind of wine bar that doesn't want to be found. No sign, or a sign for a business that closed in 1987. A door you'd walk past a hundred times. Inside: forty seats, a chalkboard, someone's uncle deciding what you're drinking tonight.

These are the ones worth building a day around:

LISBON

Sol e Pesca, on Rua Nova do Carvalho, is a former fishing-tackle shop that now pours Portuguese wine alongside the best tinned fish of your life — conservas on bread, done so well you'll rethink your position on tinned fish. For the natural-wine deep cut, Senhor Uva in Estrela. Go before 7pm or know somebody.

PALERMO

Enoteca Picone, on Via Marconi, has been pouring Sicilian wine since 1946 — part shop, part bar, entirely serious. Ask for something from Etna and let them choose the producer. They will look at you in a way that communicates everything. Trust the look.

PARIS

Le Verre Volé, by the Canal Saint-Martin, is the cave à manger that started a movement: a wine shop with a kitchen, where the menu is written after the market and the bottle you drink comes off the shelf beside you. Order by pointing. It has never gone wrong.

TBILISI

Georgia has been making wine for 8,000 years and it shows. Vino Underground, a cellar on Galaktion Tabidze Street run by a collective of natural winemakers, pours amber wine from qvevri — clay vessels buried in the ground. Cancel whatever you had planned next. Time moves differently down there.

VIENNA

At the edge of the city, the heurigen: vineyard taverns where growers pour their own young wine by the quarter-litre under the trees. Mayer am Pfarrplatz, in the house where Beethoven once lived, is the classic. It costs almost nothing. It is one of the best evenings available in Europe.

SAN SEBASTIÁN

Bar Sport, in the Parte Vieja, does not look like the best idea on the street. It is. Pintxos stacked along the bar, txuleta smoke in the air, and cider poured the Basque way — from a height, thin stream, glass tilted, an inch at a time so it wakes up on the way down. Order the foie pintxo, drink the sidra, repeat. Nobody has ever regretted this.

The pattern, if you want one: the room is small, the list is short, and somebody in the building grew, chose, or fought for every bottle. That's the whole trick. That's always the whole trick.

More like this in the app — every city, vetted. We know a place.

• 

• 

•