Tinto de Verano

Spain's simple summer wine cooler mixing red wine with lemon-lime soda, served ice-cold on terraces across the country as a refreshing alternative to sangria.

Tinto de Verano — summer red wine — is the drink that Spaniards actually drink on hot summer days, a distinction its proponents make deliberately against sangria, which is widely considered a tourist-oriented elaboration rather than an everyday Spanish beverage. The origin is attributed to the Venta de Vargas, a roadside bar in Córdoba in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, where the proprietor began mixing cheap red wine with Casera — a Spanish citrus-flavored carbonated soft drink similar to lemon-lime soda — in the 1920s to produce a cold, refreshing, low-effort drink suited to Córdoba's extreme summer heat. Córdoba regularly records the highest summer temperatures of any city in Spain, with July and August averages above 35°C (95°F) and frequent extreme heat days above 45°C (113°F), making the need for a genuinely cooling afternoon drink a practical rather than merely aesthetic concern. The formula is deliberately simple: red wine — typically a light, inexpensive young wine from any of Spain's producing regions — mixed roughly one-to-one with Casera, sometimes with a slice of lemon, poured over ice in a tall glass. The carbonation and citrus of the Casera lighten the wine's weight and provide the refreshment that a glass of still red wine at the same temperature cannot match. In the absence of Casera, Spanish restaurants outside Spain typically substitute lemon Fanta or a similar carbonated lemon drink. The tinto de verano is found at every beach chiringuito, city terraza, and bar across Spain from June through September.