History and origin
The wine that learned to refresh — and still brings a tapa
Tinto de verano is red wine lengthened with gaseosa — or with lemon soda — served in a tall glass filled with ice, often with a slice of lemon or orange. It drinks long and cool: enough to see you through the hours when the sun is still hard on the street.
Its history leads to Córdoba. At the Venta de Vargas, in the El Brillante area north of the city, D. Federico Vargas began, in the 1920s and early 1930s, mixing red wine with soda siphon to make it more refreshing; gaseosa and citrus slices came later. The house grew so popular that in Córdoba people still order “un Vargas”. Two accounts compete over the name: customers asking for a “tinto especial de verano” to tell it apart from plain red wine, and the derivation of Vargas from “Val-gas”, Valdepeñas with gaseosa.
At the Almerían counter it holds a very precise place: it is the tapa’s wine when the heat rules out a glass of red. And wine has roots close by — the vineyards of the Almerían Alpujarra grow between 700 and 1,000 metres, under the Laujar-Alpujarra PGI, a step from Alhama along the Andarax road.
