Port wine and Madeira wine are well-known Portuguese fortified varieties, but Moscatel de Setúbal remains a perfect stranger for many visitors. Which is a shame, since this wine – complex and elegant, with a delicate sweetness and rich flavor – is one of Portugal’s great vinous pleasures. In Lisbon and the south bank, it’s common to enjoy a small glass of Moscatel (muscatel) as either an aperitif (chilled) or a digestive. The fertile land of Setúbal, a peninsula south of the city of Lisbon, has long-been a wine producing region. It is not known exactly when Moscatel – which is made from the Muscat grape, although the name also refers to the grape itself – was first made here, but it is generally accepted that the Phoenicians and Ancient Greeks were trading the wine in the estuary of the Sado River.

Amaghleba Street and its environs stretch like a long arm of the Sololaki neighborhood up into Tbilisi’s hills. The broad main street is lined with 19th-century brick buildings, some of them graced with the magnificent wooden balconies characteristic of Old Tbilisi. At No. 16 sits Terracotta, where a patinaed metal awning hangs over steps heading down into the small, welcoming restaurant and wine bar below. The warm earth tones inside evoke its history as a ceramics studio, and the vases, cups and plates on display are a direct inheritance of Tata Samkharadze, who took over her parents’ art space when they chose to close it in 2018. In its place, she opened a small restaurant a year later with cook Anna Burduli.

This may come as a surprise, even to locals, but Barcelona has its own “urban” vineyards and winery. Located inside an old masía (farmhouse) in Collserola Natural Park, a vast greenspace on the edge of Barcelona’s northwestern city limits, the winery – originally a project established by the Barcelona City Council – uses grenache and syrah grapes grown in those vineyards to produce an outstanding full-bodied blend. But more than simply a winery, the project, known as Can Calopa-L’Olivera, is also an effort to provide city dwellers some important lessons about sustainability and the existence of alternative economies. At the same time, it allows agricultural life to make a healing return to the urban sphere, something Barcelona locals started thinking about more seriously during the Covid crisis.

We spent our first few years in Georgia in a whirlwind of overindulgence, hostages to the unforgiving hospitality of friends and acquaintances. Try as they might to convince us that their wine and chacha were so “clean” we would not get hangovers, there were plenty of mornings when the insides of our skulls felt like 60-grain sandpaper and our tongues like welcome mats for packs of wet street mongrels. We would hobble out of bed and stumble to the fridge and, if lucky, find two of Georgia’s most recognized hangover remedies: Borjomi mineral water and matzoni, Georgian yogurt.

While many city folks feel the call of Mother Nature and dream of moving to the countryside, Francesco Cerutti had a different idea: “Why not bring the country to the city?” Always innovating, he is trying to “ruralify” Barcelona through an activity that has been strictly connected with pastures, shepherds and the like: cheesemaking. In 2019, Francesco opened a cheese shop in the city’s Gràcia neighborhood, but he doesn’t just sell dairy goods here. Pinullet is a workshop where customers can see, and even participate in, the rustic and ancient art of transforming simple milk into sophisticated, mouthwatering cheeses. Originally from Pavia in northern Italy, Francesco studied agricultural and livestock sciences so that he could be a veterinarian for cows and pigs.

Snail khinkali? It might sound, at first, like an odd combination. On closer consideration of Georgian cuisine and history, however, it makes good sense. For one thing – perhaps the most important – they’re tasty, and we have yet to hear anyone who’s tried them disagree. The signature dish at Metis restaurant, which is – for now at least –the only place in Tbilisi one can have them, they remind us more of mushroom than of meat khinkali: savory, smooth, a little buttery, with some brightness from parsley and a hint of pastis. Metis’ logo, a snail with a khinkali for a shell, expresses the playful blend of French and Georgian cuisines that owner Thibault Flament is pursuing in close collaboration with his chef, Goarik Padaryan.