When the exotic beverage known as coffee first appeared in Europe in the second half of the 17th century, inns, taverns, alehouses, pubs and caterers of every description were already well-entrenched. While the restaurant* was yet to be invented, there were nonetheless plenty of places to get a drink, meal or a snack.
Early coffee houses were noisy, even raucous places where men (it was men only at that point) could meet, lounge about, read newspapers, argue equably about politics and conduct business. Initially, food doesn’t seem to have been part of the picture.
It’s hard to know exactly why, when a new riff on these institutions appeared in the late 18th century, they became known as cafés. Historians of sociability describe these spots as emerging to serve the needs of a growing urban population of laborers, shop clerks and office workers. Within a hundred years, they were ubiquitous. Paris alone boasted a stunning 42,000 cafés, or about 11 per 1000 inhabitants.
The café has many romantic associations — just think of Sartre and Beauvoir at Les Deux Magots, above — but none more delightful than the ones you yourself bring home from visits to Paris, Milan, Madrid or Budapest (where café life is pretty much life itself) or from the simple neighborhood mom and pops that are responsible for much of the homey charm of out-of-the-way villages and townships all over Europe. If at such a spot you once enjoyed some modest regional dish, competently prepared and served by a welcoming host with a carafe of local wine, chances are you never forgot it.
In the wine corner, you’ll sometimes hear us talk about café wine as if it were a recognized category. It’s not, really, but should be.
For us, café-level wine describes something at once serviceable, drinkable, economical and pleasurable. Serviceable, meaning that it has the soundness and character to do what is asked of it. Drinkable, because in this context a wine is like a good story that gets on with it and doesn’t encumber the narrative with big words or challenging sentence structure.
Because these wines are typically served alongside modestly-priced dishes, it is essential that they are likewise affordable, and served in ways that are tuned to individual taste and capacity. It’s a rarity today, but I remember enjoying the sight of a single bottle making its way around a tiny dining room, a knotted string dangling inside the neck marking how much each table had consumed and thus ensuring the accuracy of l’addition.
One does still routinely see wine brought to the café table in a sturdy carafe or jug (in Palermo or Naples it might be the ancient cucumela) containing a half or even a quarter bottle.
As for the pleasurable part, let’s just say that in this respect, café wine makes its contribution as part of a team — playing its role, doing its job. Not drawing attention to itself, but doing its best to make the whole meal sing.
It goes without saying that wines of this stripe make ideal weeknight sips, and are perfect for laying in a small stock to serve as house wines. At home, we enjoy mixing it up bit. That way, from night to night and without ever leaving home. we get to revisit some of the little towns and cafés that have welcomed us in our travels over the years,
Tonight Colmar; tomorrow Salamanca.
*Defined as a place offering a fixed, printed menu of single-serve, cooked dishes you could order at almost any hour and consume at a table set just for you.