Sometimes the living room just isn’t quite enough.
Sometimes you pour out that glass of the good stuff and can’t help but imagine how much happier you’d be if you were somewhere incredible or unusual or beautiful… or even just plain ridiculous. These places exist for those times.
Fifteen hundred years ago, a chap called Honoratus arrived on the Île Saint-Honorat, near Cannes, with the intention of living a quiet life as a hermit. He promptly failed, being quickly joined by a number of disciples who proceeded to build Lérins Abbey and form a monastic community around it. Today, a small cadre of monks on that same island continue a thousand-year-old winemaking tradition. The island (including the Abbey) is open to the public, and offers visitors a genuinely remarkable opportunity to see the art of viticulture being practiced by the same kindred of winemakers who flooded Europe with it back in the Middle Ages.
Cinque Terre is a pretty extraordinary place in general – the colour, the natural beauty, the rusticity of it all – but then, so is Santorini. So is Porto. So is Alsace. Why put Cinque Terre on this list, and none of those? It’s all about the terraces. The vast majority of the grapes cultivated in Cinque Terre are grown on terraces situated on the perilously steep hillsides around the iconic villages for which the region is known. To prevent these terraces from falling into the sea, 1,250 miles of dry stone wall (that’s longer than the Great Wall of China, for those keeping score) was built over the course of hundreds of years by the early winemakers of Cinque Terre. 1,250 miles: that’s like building a wall from London to Rome and using it to make wine. They knew how to use their time, those folk.
One to visit for people who like a bit of depth to their wines. Beneath the streets of Aranda de Duero, in Ribera del Duero, is a vast labyrinth of interconnected wine cellars and tunnels that was built between the 12th and 17th centuries. Most of the restaurants in the centre of the town sit atop the caves (and use them as wine cellars), so getting inside is hardly difficult either. Today, cultural groups known as peñas organise events and tastings within the cellars, which you can visit during our Spain wine tours. Frankly, you’d need never leave.
It’s a yearning we’ve all experienced – to be pottering along one day, living your life with perfect contentment and happily getting by, when, out of nowhere, you’re struck by a thought. A thought that is sudden as it is dazzling. A thought that puts all other thoughts to shame. A thought that, you suspect, might just change your life. “Gee, I sure would love to bathe in wine.”
Enter Le Tre Vaselle, a spa in Umbria, Italy which offers wine massages, wine scrubs and, of course, wine baths. Because apparently you’ve never really experienced Sangiovese wine until you’ve been submerged in it.
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The Marathon du Médoc is a long-distance footrace which occurs every year and sees around 1,500 participants undertaking a 26-mile marathon (very often in costume) through the vineyards of Bordeaux, stopping 27 times along the way for cheese, oysters, steak, ice cream, locally-made wines and more. Fireworks, dancers, bands and more crowd the starting and finish lines, and every year the race seems to get more ridiculous and more extravagant. The Guardian say it ‘sounds like the most idiotic race known to man’. We say it sounds like the absolute greatest thing, race or otherwise, that mankind has ever produced (except maybe wine baths).
La Tour d’Argent is a Parisian restaurant which sits on the Seine, a few minutes’ walk from Notre Dame. As is the case with many restaurants, they serve food, but that’s not what we’re focusing on here. La Tour d’Argent’s wine list is 400 pages long. What follows is a list of classic works of writing that are, by page count, shorter than La Tour d’Argent’s selection of wines.
And not one of those novels will give you wine if you read them. Take that, literature.
Well, you wanted somewhere amazing. Mileștii Mici is a winery in Moldova which is… well, it’s big. 2 million bottles of wine, stored in 120 miles of cellar, form a literal city – with streets and architecture and everything – built solely for the purpose of storing them. Yes, it’s open to visitors. Yes, tastings are available. And yes, you’ll need a car to get around. And who knows – maybe, just maybe, if you look hard enough and truly believe, right in the deepest darkest depths of Mileștii Mici, you’ll find a spa that does wine baths.
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