Skip to main content

Conviviality



Conviviality is a beautiful term. It is a term we have heard many times in the past few months from European people for whom English is not their first language.


To be convivial is to be social. Despite it being a word in English, it is a term that we don’t use a lot. 


Convivial drinks is a drinking experience that is shared, usually in the afternoon or early evening ie pre-dinner. The alcohol relaxes and thus enhances the conversation.  


When tasting wines at the cellar door or beers at a brewery, specific wines and beers have been described as “for conviviality”. They are to be drunk slowly and socially.  They are best described as inexpensive but good wine or full flavoured beer, often higher in alcohol.


In Belgium they are likely to be served with a mild cheese square or dry salami dipped in mustard. In Germany they may be served with a pretzel; and in Spain it is accompanied by Pintxos.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to take a Van-life gap year

How to take a Van-life gap year You don’t just wake up one day, book tickets, fly to Europe and pick up the first campervan you see.  There is a lot of planning and organizing to make it happen. For us, it was a concept that we worked towards over two years and got serious about in the last 6-8 months.  Van purchase In researching vans, we learned that we could buy one, but couldn't insure or register it without being either European residents (read: address, bank account and utility bills in the country we wished to buy the van in) or set up a company to own, insure and register the van. Now this is not straight-forward as one needs to be able to navigate the system from the other side of the world and in another language (as vans in the UK / Ireland were considerably more expensive than on the continent). There are a number of companies who provide services in this space.  We chose EuroCampingCars, because they are based in France and deal in la...
2 comments
Read more

Highland Games

Arriving in Scotland we saw Highland Games advertised in almost every town that we visited. The problem for us was the events were either the week before or in 4 days time; never at a time convenient for us. Our luck changed on the Scottish Borders town of Peebles; all the stars aligned.  Highland Games are when local communities get together and celebrate Scottish culture. All Highland games include: a pipe band competition, highland dancing, and traditional heavy events including caber tossing, hammer throwing, and the crowd favourite of haggis hurling.  Pipe bands and dancing are open to all ages and cover a range of abilities Shot putt is the same as the Olympic event but competitors are free to use whatever technique works for them. Some use a standing throw, others use a run up or spinning preparation.   Hammer throwing, unlike its Olympic equivalent the hammer has a wooden handle and the athlete does not spin in a circle before throwing it. ...
2 comments
Read more

Ben Nevis – Bagging our first Munro

To a Scottish person, a Munro is a mountain over 1000m in height. To hike up one is to "bag" it. Every Scot can tell you how many Munros they've bagged.  Now a 1000m doesn't sound that high but the base of almost all Scottish mountains is close to sea level.   Yesterday we bagged our first Munro, Ben Nevis the UKs highest peak. Ben Nevis is walked by 12,000 people a year. In rough figures that is 400 a day. It is not walkable all year. Even without the winter snow, the almost constant cloud cover and accompanying rain mean that there are few great days to climb it.   We had checked the forecast and saw a window in the morning and knowing that thousands would attempt the climb we resolved to start early. The alarm went off at 5am. We started at about 5m above sea level and hiked the 1345m to the summit. The hike has three distinct sections: 1. The base to the saddle: the path winds its way through silver birch forest and sheep paddocks w...
2 comments
Read more