What to Drink in Lisbon: The Wine Bars Worth the Walk

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The best Lisbon wine bars are small, steep to reach and pour almost nothing you can buy at home, which is the point of going. Portugal grows more than 250 native grape varieties, most of them never exported in quantity, and the city’s bars have spent the last decade turning that into a drinking culture that runs from a €4 glass of Bairrada Baga in a Bairro Alto tasca to a 1960s Colares at a counter with eight stools. November is the month to go: the crowds thin, the light is low and gold by four in the afternoon, and the new Vinho Verde releases and the year’s first Alentejo reds are just arriving. This is the walk, roughly west to east, with the bars that earn the hills.

Chiado and Cais do Sodré: start at the source

By the Wine (Rua das Flores 41) is the flagship of José Maria da Fonseca, the Setúbal house founded in 1834 and the producer of Periquita, the first branded Portuguese table wine. The room is a vaulted cellar with more than 3,000 green bottles set into the ceiling, and the list is the house’s own: Periquita Reserva, the Domini Plus from the Douro, and a flight of Moscatel de Setúbal by the glass, from the young and floral to the 20-year-old that tastes of orange marmalade and walnut. Order the ham and the Azeitão cheese and treat it as a tasting room, which is what it is.

Five minutes downhill toward the river, Comida Independente (Rua Cais do Tojo 28) is the opposite proposition: a grocery and wine shop with a counter, open since 2018, stocked entirely from small Portuguese producers. The wines by the glass change daily and lean toward the natural and biodynamic end, from Alentejo talha wines fermented in clay amphorae to Dão reds from growers with two hectares. Buy the bottle from the shelf, pay the small corkage, and eat the conservas and the bread with it. It closes at eight, so it is a lunch or a late-afternoon stop.

Bairro Alto and Príncipe Real: the old guard and the smallest bar in town

Garrafeira Alfaia (Rua do Diário de Notícias 125) has been pouring in Bairro Alto since before wine bars were a category here. It is a dark, wood-panelled wine shop with a few tables, a list of several hundred Portuguese bottles and a short, honest glass selection: Quinta do Crasto from the Douro, Esporão from the Alentejo, Luís Pato from Bairrada. The food is cheese, presunto and alheira sausage, and the staff will open almost anything on the shelf if two people are drinking it. Go early, before the street fills up with the bar crawl.

Up the hill in Príncipe Real, Black Sheep (Praça das Flores 62) calls itself Lisbon’s smallest wine bar and may be right. There are a handful of seats inside and a few more on the square, and the list is a working sommelier’s notebook of small growers: Portuguese first, then cult bottles from the Jura, Austria and Georgia. The by-the-glass board changes every day. It is the place to ask for something from Colares, the sand-dune vineyards west of the city where Ramisco vines were never grafted because phylloxera could not cross the sand, and where fewer than a dozen producers remain.

Estrela and Campo de Ourique: the natural wine neighbourhood

The quiet streets around the Jardim da Estrela have become Lisbon’s natural wine district. Senhor Uva (Rua de Santo Amaro 66A), opened by two Quebecers in 2019, pairs a rotating list of low-intervention wines, most of them Portuguese, with a plant-based menu that is the best of its kind in the city. The owners visit growers every week and the board reflects it: skin-contact Arinto from Lisboa, pét-nat from Vinho Verde, old-vine Baga. Its sibling bar Senhor Manuel is across the street for a faster glass.

Twenty minutes’ walk west in residential Campo de Ourique, Red Nose (Rua Almeida e Sousa) is a natural wine bar and grocery that runs guest-chef nights and tastings and has become the neighbourhood’s living room. Take tram 28 to the end of the line and walk from there.

Alfama and Graça: the hills that pay off

Prado Mercearia (Rua das Pedras Negras 35), a few steps from the cathedral, is the grocery-and-wine-bar offshoot of Prado, the restaurant that did more than any other to put Portuguese organic and biodynamic wine on the city’s tables. The list is entirely Portuguese and changes constantly; glasses start around €7 and the shelves are the best place in the city to buy bottles from the growers you have been drinking all day. The small plates, cured fish, bread, seasonal vegetables, are the standard by which the others are judged.

Keep climbing to Graça for Vino Vero (Travessa do Monte 30), the Lisbon outpost of the Venetian natural wine bar, opened in 2019. The crowd spills onto the lane most nights, the wines are Italian and Portuguese in roughly equal measure, and it is the only place in this list where a glass of Friulian Ribolla sits next to a Bairrada on the same board. Arrive before eight or expect to stand.

What to order, and what to bring home

Drink the things that do not travel. Colares, Bairrada Baga with a decade on it, dry white Port on ice, talha wines from Vidigueira, Madeira by the glass, Moscatel de Setúbal with age. Ask for a Loureiro or Alvarinho from a single Vinho Verde subregion rather than the generic fizzy version, and for a Dão from one of the growers rather than the cooperatives. Most bars will pour a taste before you commit; this is a city that still treats wine as food.

For the suitcase, or for the Lisbon mood at home once the trip is over, these are the producers most likely to be on the Portuguese shelf in the US:

• Quinta do Crasto Douro Reserva Old Vines: a field blend of some thirty varieties from vines up to a century old, dense, mineral and built for a decade. Shop it at Wine.com
• Soalheiro Alvarinho: the benchmark single-variety Alvarinho from Monção e Melgaço, the Vinho Verde subregion that produces the serious version. Shop it at Wine.com
• Esporão Reserva Branco: barrel-fermented Antão Vaz, Arinto and Roupeiro from the Alentejo, waxy, rich and the white Garrafeira Alfaia pours by the glass. Shop it at Wine.com
• José Maria da Fonseca Moscatel de Setúbal 20 Year: the By the Wine glass that stops conversation, to serve with almond tart or on its own after dinner. Shop it at Wine.com

Wear shoes with grip; the calçada pavement is polished glass after rain, and every bar on this list is at the top or bottom of a hill. The one that is worth the steepest walk is Black Sheep, for the Colares.