Champagneria Wine Bar: Champagne and Cava in a Prague Alley Out of an Adventure Story
I go to the Christmas markets on Old Town Square every year - and every year I walk past the mulled wine stalls, whose product I'd diplomatically describe as underwhelming. My reliable spot is a few hundred meters further on, in an alley most passers-by never even notice.
Champagneria is a small wine bar serving Champagne, cava and other sparkling wines in Průchodní Street in Prague's Old Town - and in the run-up to Christmas it's also a place that pours mulled wine bearing no resemblance to the competition out on the square.
The Name Promises France, the Pedigree Comes from Barcelona
Champagneria sounds French right up to the moment you look at the ending. The -ería pattern is Spanish: a cervecería is a beer bar, a pastelería a pastry shop, and a champañería - in Catalan xampanyeria - is a place that pours sparkling wine.
Cava, Champagne and a Fight Over a Name
Only wine from the French region of Champagne is allowed to call itself Champagne. Catalan cava is made by the same traditional method - the second fermentation happens right in the bottle and the wine then spends months on the lees - and yet it still can't use the name. So a large part of what you pay for in a bottle of Champagne is the protected name, not different craftsmanship. Order by taste rather than by label and you can't go wrong. That's exactly what Champagneria is built on: the sommelier brings in Catalan cavas and Alsatian crémants, and the list keeps growing - alongside the bubbles you'll now find still and natural wines too, and oysters from September to February.
How Drinking Works at Champagneria
The doors don't open until four in the afternoon - Champagneria isn't competing with lunch menus, it's an evening place, plain and simple. You can have a glass or a whole bottle; on my visits, bottles started at around 500 CZK (20 EUR). The place is small and it's usually full, so book ahead, especially when the wine comes with an exhibition, a tasting or live music - Champagneria doubles as a small gallery. The décor is a bit dated and I've always liked it, right down to the logistics of a small building: one room chills the bottles in wine cabinets, the other warms the guests with gas patio heaters in the corners. The staff are friendly, quick, and you can tell they enjoy the job - you can see it in the origami folded on the glass cloche. They speak English and take cards.
Mulled Wine in a Cut-Glass Tumbler
I come back to Champagneria regularly around Christmas, on my way to the markets. The entrance in the side alley is easy to miss - Průchodní Street looks like it stepped out of Jaroslav Foglar's adventure stories about a labyrinth of crooked old-town lanes, right down to the kink halfway along. Inside I get a 0.2 l cut-glass tumbler of red mulled wine for 85 CZK (3.40 EUR), with cinnamon and a slice of citrus floating on top. It's honest mulled wine, it tastes of wine and spices rather than sugar - nothing like the underwhelming liquid they pour into paper cups a few hundred meters away. If you're in a hurry they'll pour it to go; the cut-glass tumbler is part of the ritual, though. A bar full of Champagne, cava and crémant - and lately, I'm sorry to say, mulled wine is the only thing I come here for. Because honest mulled wine for the Prague Christmas markets isn't sold at the markets.
Champagneria
