Here is the correction most visitors to Spain never get: the pitcher of sangria on the tourist menu is not what the country drinks. The glass in front of the local at the next table is tinto de verano, red wine cut half and half with lemon soda over ice, and it has a documented birthplace. It was first poured at a roadside inn called the Venta de Vargas on the Carretera del Brillante outside Córdoba in the 1920s, where the owner, Federico Vargas del Moral, diluted his house Valdepeñas with gaseosa so his customers could keep drinking through the Andalusian heat.
The mistake costs you twice. You pay a tourist premium for sangria that was likely mixed from a carton, and you mark yourself as someone who ordered from the laminated photo menu. Meanwhile the drink Spaniards actually order all summer is cheaper, lighter, faster to make, and honest about what it is. At fiesta in Pamplona, where the local wine traditions have their own names entirely, ordering sangria is close to announcing you have done no homework at all.
This article draws on the Spanish press record of the Venta de Vargas story, the published legal text of the European Union regulation that governs the word sangria, the industrial history of Spain’s two great gaseosa houses as documented by the Basque industrial heritage association AVPIOP, and the working knowledge of Pamplona’s bars that comes from spending every July in them.
The Inn on the Carretera del Brillante
The origin story of tinto de verano is unusually specific for a folk drink. In the 1920s, Federico Vargas del Moral ran a venta, a roadside inn, on the Carretera del Brillante, the road climbing out of Córdoba toward the Sierra Morena. Córdoba is one of the hottest cities in Europe, with summer afternoons routinely above 40 degrees Celsius, and straight red wine at that temperature is punishment. Vargas began stretching his house red, a Valdepeñas, the everyday table wine of Andalusia at the time, with cold gaseosa, the barely sweet carbonated lemon water that Spanish bottlers had been producing since the 19th century.
The inn was already a gathering point for Córdoba’s flamenco scene, which meant traffic, and the drink traveled with the crowd. Regulars ordered it as “un vargas.” Customers from outside the circle asked for “tinto especial de verano,” special summer red, to distinguish it from the ordinary tinto, and the shortened name is the one that survived. The account is recorded in the Spanish press, including a 2022 history in El Economista, and repeated consistently across independent Spanish sources. What began as one innkeeper’s answer to the heat became a national standard, then a supermarket category.
That specificity matters because sangria has nothing like it. Sangria is a family of wine punches with no single birthplace, no founding bar, and a history that runs through export marketing as much as through any Spanish table. One drink has a street address. The other has a brand story.
What It Is, and What the Law Says Sangria Is
The recipe for tinto de verano has two ingredients: chilled red wine and gaseosa, in roughly equal parts, served over ice, usually with a slice of lemon. There is no chopped fruit, no brandy, no added sugar, and no hour of maceration. Because the wine is diluted by half, the drink lands around 6 or 7 percent alcohol, which is the entire point. It is built for drinking slowly across a long, hot afternoon without falling out of it.
Bars pour two standard versions. Ask for it “con gaseosa,” sometimes “con blanca,” and you get the classic: dry, barely sweet, the La Casera style. Ask “con limón” and you get lemon soda instead, sweeter and closer to a soft drink, in the north very often made with Kas Limón. Neither is more correct. The gaseosa version is what the Venta de Vargas poured; the lemon version is what much of Spain drinks now.
Beer runs the same fork. A clara is beer cut with gaseosa rather than wine, and the regional rule flips depending on where you order it: in Madrid and much of the south, plain gaseosa is the default and lemon needs to be requested by name, while in Navarra, the Basque Country, and Cantabria the roles reverse entirely, and beer with lemon is not called clara at all.
Sangria, by contrast, is legally defined. Regulation (EU) No 251/2014, the European Union rule on aromatised wine products, defines sangria as wine with fruit, sweetening, and optionally spirits, and it reserves the bare sales name “Sangría” for product made in Spain or Portugal. Made anywhere else in the EU, it must be labeled “aromatised wine based drink” with the country of production attached. The full text is public at EUR-Lex. The regulation tells you what sangria became: an export label worth protecting, a product category. Nobody has ever needed a regulation for wine and soda poured in the same glass, because tinto de verano never left the bar. Wine writers covering Spain, including Wine Spectator, note the same split: sangria reads as commercial and touristic inside Spain, while tinto de verano is what locals order.
The Gaseosa Houses That Carried It
Tinto de verano scaled because gaseosa scaled. The drink’s second ingredient is an industrial product with its own history, and two companies dominate it. La Casera was founded in Madrid on 31 May 1949 by three brothers, Francisco, Víctor and Félix Duffo González, whose father had bottled soft drinks before the Civil War. From its first factory on Calle Cactus, the brand became so synonymous with gaseosa that its 1980s advertising slogan, “Si no hay Casera, nos vamos” (if there is no Casera, we are leaving), entered everyday speech as the standard joke for any non negotiable demand. The brand, now part of the Orangina Schweppes group, remains the default gaseosa behind the bar, and its history is documented in the Spanish press, including El Independiente.
The lemon side of the drink belongs to the north. Kas comes from Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the Knörr family had brewed beer since Román Knörr Streiff founded the La Esperanza brewery in 1870. His descendant Román Knörr Ortiz de Urbina opened a gaseosa plant called El AS in 1926, and in 1956 Luis Knörr Elorza added concentrated fruit juice to the house gaseosa and created KAS, one of Spain’s first flavored sodas, orange first and lemon close behind, before Fanta had established itself in the Spanish market. The Basque industrial heritage association AVPIOP documents the Vitoria factory’s history. PepsiCo has owned the brand since the early 1990s, but Kas Limón remains the northern bar standard, which is why a tinto de verano con limón in Pamplona usually tastes of it.
Both companies now sell tinto de verano ready mixed in bottles, as does Don Simón, in classic, lemon, and alcohol free versions. The bottled versions are serviceable and hugely popular for the beach and the picnic. In a bar, the drink should still be built in the glass.
What to Order at Fiesta in Pamplona
San Fermín has its own wine mixing traditions, and it is worth being precise about where tinto de verano sits among them, because it is not a festival ritual. The drink the peñas haul through the streets in jugs is kalimotxo, red wine and cola, a Basque invention with its own history and its own article on this site. The punch poured from doorways and peña bars during fiesta is zurracapote, wine macerated with fruit and cinnamon, which is the closest thing Pamplona has to sangria and is made by people, not poured from cartons. And the wine on the table at any proper Navarran lunch in July is as likely to be a cold rosado from DO Navarra, the region’s own summer answer that needs no soda at all.
Tinto de verano is the everyday drink underneath all of that. It is what locals order at a terrace at five in the afternoon on an ordinary Tuesday in August, and it is available at any bar in the Casco Viejo for a fraction of what a tourist pitcher of sangria costs. Order it in four words: “un tinto de verano.” The bartender may ask “¿con gaseosa o con limón?” and either answer is respectable. What you will almost never see is a Pamplona local with a pitcher of sangria, because sangria in tourist quantity is a menu item aimed at visitors, not a habit anyone here keeps.
The honest summary for a fiesta visitor: drink zurracapote when a peña offers it, drink kalimotxo if you are marching behind a txaranga at two in the morning, drink rosado at the table, and drink tinto de verano everywhere else you would have ordered sangria. Every one of those choices costs less and reads as someone who knows where they are. The festival’s dangers are on the street in the morning, not in the glass, but the glass still tells everyone around you exactly who you are.
FAQ
What is tinto de verano made of?
Two ingredients: chilled red wine and gaseosa, a lightly sweetened lemon carbonated water, mixed roughly half and half over ice, usually finished with a lemon slice. The common variant swaps gaseosa for lemon soda and is ordered “con limón.” There is no fruit, no brandy, and no added sugar in the classic version, which puts the drink at roughly 6 to 7 percent alcohol.
Is tinto de verano the same as sangria?
No. Sangria is wine with fruit, sweetening, and often added spirits, and under EU Regulation 251/2014 the name can only be used as a standalone sales denomination for product made in Spain or Portugal. Tinto de verano is just wine and soda, lighter and drier, with no maceration. Inside Spain, sangria is widely seen as a drink for tourists while tinto de verano is the everyday local order.
Where was tinto de verano invented?
At the Venta de Vargas, a roadside inn on the Carretera del Brillante outside Córdoba, in the 1920s. The owner, Federico Vargas del Moral, mixed his house Valdepeñas red with cold gaseosa so customers could drink through the Andalusian summer heat. Regulars called the drink “un vargas” before the name tinto de verano stuck.
What do locals drink at San Fermín instead of sangria?
The festival’s own traditions are kalimotxo, the wine and cola mix the peñas carry in jugs, and zurracapote, a macerated wine punch poured at peña bars during fiesta. At the table, Navarra drinks its own DO Navarra rosado. For an ordinary terrace drink at any hour, locals order tinto de verano. Sangria by the pitcher is aimed at visitors.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.