Good wine, cheap tapas, ramshackle decor and a sense of history are the key ingredients of these Madrileño institutions. I went on a bar crawl to find my favourite
T
he first hurdle to overcome when searching for the Spanish capital’s top bodegas is the correct interpretation of the word “bodega”. It is defined as a warehouse, winery, wine cellar and wine shop or bar specialising in wine. In Spanish slang it can also mean a convenience store.
I asked several people working in the Madrid wine trade, and they all struggled to define exactly what a bodega is – and sometimes disagreed with each other. For example, while La Bodega de los Reyes fits the description because it has a wine cellar, a nearby bar owner said it couldn’t be classed as a bodega as it was just a wine shop.
An internet search suggests dozens of Madrid bodegas, yet some are not the atmospheric, historic bars you may be hoping for. Bodegas de los Secretos, for example, is very much a restaurant. The excellent De Vinos retains some historic fixtures (a winning feature of Madrid’s most established bodegas), such as a marble bar and traditional decorative flooring, and offers a choice of 600 wines, but it is a modern wine bar. La Taberna de La Copla used to be known as Bodegas El Mañon and its brick-walled basement reveals a mini-museum of antique bottling paraphernalia and tinajas (large, traditional clay or earthenware jars used for storing wine). Which all seems to indicate being a bodega, but co-owner Alejandro Simon insists that it isn’t any more: “This building has a strong bodega history, but it is just too difficult to operate a bodega with the regulations in place now, and too small a market for us just to focus on wine, so we are now a bar offering a wider range.”
