A bodega is a cellar in Spain, a corner shop in New York, and a wine bar in Notting Hill, and the drift is the story
La Bodega holds a 4.1 from eight hundred and thirty-three people and charges twenty to thirty pounds.
And the word has done more travelling than almost any other in the drinks trade.
What it means in Spain
A bodega is a wine cellar or a warehouse – the place where the barrels are, where the wine is aged and stored, and where a great deal of the actual work of making it happens.
In Jerez it means something very specific and rather beautiful. The sherry bodegas are enormous, high-roofed, whitewashed buildings with earth floors that are watered to keep the humidity up, and the light comes in high, and they are called cathedrals, and the comparison is not an exaggeration.
Inside them sits the solera – a stack of barrels, in tiers, in which the oldest wine is at the bottom and the youngest at the top, and wine is drawn from the bottom and replaced from the tier above, and so on, forever.
The solera, which deserves its own paragraph
Because it means no bottle of sherry has a vintage.
The barrel at the bottom has never been emptied. It has been topped up, from the tier above, for decades or in some cases well over a century. What is drawn off today contains a trace of everything that was ever in it.
Which means that a glass of old sherry contains a molecule or two of wine made before anybody now living was born, and will continue to, for as long as the solera runs, and it will never be finished and never be new.
The Prat’s wine desk regards this as the single most elegant piece of engineering in the whole of drinks, and notes that it was invented by people who were simply trying to keep the quality consistent.
What happened to the word
It went to New York with Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants, and there it stopped meaning a wine cellar and started meaning a corner shop – the small, family-run, open-late store that sells everything, and which is the single most beloved institution in that city.
So one word means: a cathedral of sherry in Andalusia, a shop that sells cigarettes and a bacon sandwich in the Bronx, and a tapas bar in Notting Hill.
We watched the same thing happen to Hoxton, which is now a hotel in Portland, Oregon, and to Condesa, which is a bar in Covent Garden, and to tiki, which was invented by a man from Texas.
The bar
Spanish, cheerful, loud on a Friday, and doing a 4.1 across a serious sample – which is an honest number for a busy room with a lot of people in it.
Order the sherry. Nobody orders the sherry. It is the most under-drunk great wine in the world and a good fino, cold, with olives, is one of the best things available in this city for four pounds.
Verdict
Good tapas, good room, fair price.
Drink the sherry. Somebody has been topping up that barrel since before your grandmother was born.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The precision here is almost aggressive. Every observation earned, every detail researched, every footnote perfectly justified. It’s exhaustingly, beautifully honest.
My local’s been “under new management” six times since 2019. Each time the beer gets worse and the lighting gets brighter. Someone write that up.