Tips for "travelling" with your favourite brands in perfect condition wherever you go.

You are going on a trip to enjoy your well-deserved holidays and you don't want to give up your passion: wine. What can you do? Don't despair, here are some good tips to be able to continue tasting your favourite brands wherever you are. To do so, we are going to make a distinction between two categories of travellers: those who prefer to take their wine with them in their suitcase and those who choose to travel "light".

Take your wines with you

If you have fixed tastes, loyal to your favourite brands and wines and you are afraid of not easily finding these references in your holiday destination, you can choose to take your wines with you. To do so, take note of these tips that will be very useful when packing your luggage:

• Keep your wines chilled for a few hours before you set off on your trip. It is most likely that, during the summer season, wine is subjected to high temperatures during its transport, so the colder it is when you start your journey, the longer it will take to warm up and, consequently, the less it will suffer during the trip.
• Don't put your wine in your travel bag with the rest of your luggage (clothes, shoes). It is not the best place for it to keep a stable temperature but, in addition, the cork can tend to come out if it reaches high temperatures in the luggage compartment, so it could get lost, with the consequent textile drama.

• Put the wines in a separate suitcase or in individual cardboard boxes (if you usually buy wine online, keep the original packaging because it can be useful for this), wrapped in bubble wrap or, as a last resort, wrapped in newspaper or similar. For the "pros", special suitcases for transporting wine can be purchased on the market, in which the bottles are covered with shock-absorbing material and are airtight, thus preventing the wine from overheating.
• If you are travelling in an air-conditioned vehicle, try, as far as possible, to keep the wine in the passenger compartment of the vehicle, where the temperature will remain more stable, but always well covered to prevent light from shining directly on the bottles.
• Once you arrive at your destination, let the wines rest for at least 24 hours before consuming them, so that the liquid recovers its original balance. Some people talk about leaving the bottles to rest for up to a week if the trip has been very long or if they are very delicate bottles of wine, but as a general recommendation, and for a trip of just a few hours, we believe that a rest of a day or two at the most may be sufficient.

Once in your holiday home, these tips that we have already given you in a post will be very useful  if you want to keep your wine for longer.

Let yourself be carried away by the local wines

If, as we said at the beginning, you prefer to carry less luggage because you are not travelling with your own vehicle but you still want to enjoy your favourite wines, look for shops in your holiday destination that have a good selection of brands. If you are travelling in Spain, in our Bar Map, as well as finding the best places to enjoy a good wine, you will also find a long list of wine shops where you can buy some of your favourite wines.

However, our advice is that, rather than continuing to look for the wines you have always consumed, you should dare to try new things and go for local wines (if you are in or near a wine-producing area), which will obviously be easier to find and will allow you to broaden your horizon of wine tastes.

If you're going to a beach destination, there are dozens of producing areas near the coast: all the appellations in the Balearic and Canary Islands; Jerez, Málaga and Condado de Huelva in Andalusia; Jumilla in Murcia; Alicante and Valencia on the Levantine coast; Alella and Empordà in Catalonia; the txakolí appellations in the Basque Country; Rías Baixas in Galicia; among many others. If you feel lost, get advice from sommeliers if you are in a restaurant or a shop or, as we suggested a few weeks ago, use our online search engine and take advantage of the different filters available to find the best options in the winemaking area you are in.

At this point we go further and we even encourage you to plan a wine tourism trip to one of the marvellous Denominaciones de Origen that we have in Spain. If you are a nature lover, here are some of the vineyards that are a sight to behold and if architecture is your thing, don't miss these gems that can be found today in some of the best-known wine-producing areas in Spain. In all these destinations you can find wines that will surely suit your personal tastes: red, white, rosé, sparkling, fortified and sweet wines, etc. Enjoy your holidays with wine!