In the Netflix series New Amsterdam, which everyone is watching now, about New York's oldest hospital, one character talks to another about Barcelona. And the other replies: "Barcelona! I love sangria." Sangria. Lou Reed mentions it in Perfect Day, as a drink to have "in the park."
I have had some good sangria, of course. Sangria is, after all, a cocktail. And a cocktail, in its early days, was simply a mixture that tried to disguise the poor quality of the main ingredient. "The only whiskey we have is Canadian? What else do we have? With what we have, we'll invent the Manhattan..."
But this necessity (which comes from Prohibition) does not mean that there aren't happy and perfect cocktails. The Manhattan, for me, is one of them. The Negroni perhaps the most. Or the gimlet, which I discovered, before I was of legal drinking age, with the detective novel collection La cua de palla. It's detective Philip Marlowe's favorite cocktail, and in fact, The Long Goodbye begins with him drinking one in a Los Angeles bar (and that's where he meets Terry Lennox, dead drunk). The detective's recipe is with Rose's lime (I can no longer use any other) but the original recipe is with natural lime juice and syrup.
That in a series, Barcelona stands out for sangria is unfair for one reason. No native will go to a bar to order it. Just as no native will eat a paella like Heston Blumenthal's, made in the microwave.
Last summer, when everything we are now experiencing (dumbfounded and accustomed) was beginning, something happened that was a prelude to what might happen to us this summer. In the Balearic Islands, depending on the area, tourists had the right to go to bars and entertainment venues, but locals did not.
Israel and Great Britain rush to agree with Greece (or Greece rushes to agree with Israel and Great Britain) for summer camps. Greece has sun and sea. It can accommodate, like no one else, British and Israeli flip-flops. The British and Israelis are vaccinating at a speed that would make a knitting machine laugh. Barcelona also lives off flip-flops. It used to. So if everything goes a little well, I suppose Catalonia will also do whatever it takes to bring the hitherto criticized flip-flops (all vaccinated) to its beaches. If this happens, what we have to hope for is that all those establishments that do good things, things that we would spend money on, can open. Authenticity is this: a coca de recapte, a Priorat wine, good bread with tomato on a terrace in Barcelona. What the natives would eat. What we natives long to eat.