The best wine bars in Madrid

The three kinds of wine bar in Madrid

The taberna is the oldest form: tiled walls, a zinc counter, vermouth on tap, a house wine that costs less than a coffee in Paris, and a small free tapa with every drink. You do not go for the wine list, you go because it is EUR 3 and it works.

The wine bar proper is a newer phenomenon: a list of 30 to 200 references, staff who taste, and food designed to go with it. Prices run EUR 4 to EUR 8 a glass and the Rioja and Ribera del Duero selections in the good ones are outstanding.

The natural wine room is the third register, concentrated in Malasana, Lavapies, and Chueca, pouring low-intervention Spanish producers alongside French and Italian imports.

La Latina, the Sunday crawl

Cava Baja and the streets around it form the densest concentration of tabernas in Madrid. On Sunday, after the El Rastro flea market winds down around 15:00, the whole neighbourhood turns into a standing wine and vermouth crawl that runs into the evening.

The technique is Spanish: one drink and one tapa per bar, then move. Do not sit down, do not order a full plate, do not stay more than twenty minutes. Six bars in three hours is normal and the walking between them is the point.

For a group this is the single best-designed drinking format in Europe, because nobody has to find a table for eight.

• Start on Cava Baja around 14:30 on a Sunday
• One drink, one tapa, twenty minutes, move on
• Vermut de grifo, vermouth on tap, is the correct first drink
• Do not book anything, the format does not work with reservations
• End with a proper sit-down dinner around 21:30

What to order, by region

Rioja is the default and is not boring if you order well. Ask for a crianza rather than a reserva if you want fruit, and a gran reserva if you want the old, savoury, vanilla style that made the region famous.

Ribera del Duero is bigger, darker, and more structured. Toro is bigger still. Bierzo, made from Mencia, is lighter and more aromatic and is what the wine-obsessed order.

On whites, Godello from Valdeorras is the serious one, textured and mineral. Albarino from Rias Baixas is saline and bright. Both are dramatically better than their reputation abroad, and both are cheap in Madrid.

Malasana and Lavapies for natural wine

The natural wine scene in Madrid is younger and smaller than Barcelona but growing fast, and it is centred on Malasana around Calle del Espiritu Santo, and on Lavapies.

The Spanish producers to look for are from Sierra de Gredos, where old-vine Garnacha grown at altitude makes light, perfumed reds that taste closer to Burgundy than to Rioja, and from Canary Islands producers working on volcanic soil with pre-phylloxera vines.

Prices sit around EUR 4 to EUR 7 a glass, EUR 25 to EUR 40 a bottle.

The free tapa rule

Madrid is one of the last Spanish cities where a drink still comes with a free tapa in ordinary bars. It is usually small: olives, crisps, a slice of tortilla, a piece of bread with something on it. In some tabernas it is genuinely good.

The etiquette is that you do not ask for it, you do not choose it, and you do not complain about it. Order a second drink and a different tapa arrives. Four drinks across four bars is effectively dinner, which is how a lot of Madrid actually eats.

Timing, because Madrid runs late

Vermouth hour is 12:30 to 14:30. Lunch is 14:00 to 16:00. The pre-dinner drink is 20:00 to 22:00. Dinner is 21:30 to 23:30. Bars keep going well past 01:00.

A group that turns up for dinner at 19:30 will be eating alone in an empty room. Shift everything two hours later than you would in Northern Europe and the city makes sense immediately.