Where (And How) To Drink Alone

How do we spend our time alone?

That was a question on my mind a few weeks ago, when I had a few hours to myself in Brugge while my husband (who’s from the western region of Belgium) and our kids went off to see a Club Brugge soccer game with friends.

What to do with those hours? What would other wine lovers do with time alone? Do we enjoy that time, and is there always (or never) wine involved?

For as happily social and mainly extroverted as my life in wine enables me to be, I actually relish solitude and embrace time alone when the opportunity comes my way. So, in Brugge that evening, what to do with a few hours on my own meant two things that also make me happy: books (at the Reyghere Bookstore on the main square, or markt) and wine, at Cuvee wine bar and shop a few minutes’ walk away on Philipstockstraat. I was drawn to Cuvee for its notability as a natural wine bar, as seen on the Raisin app and elsewhere.

What was it about Cuvee that made those few hours alone so comfortable and pleasurable? It’s about the atmosphere, certainly, but it’s even more about the attitude of the staff. More on that below but first, a few thoughts on drinking alone.

The Culture of Drinking Alone

Say “drink alone” and it generally conjures up, I admit, plenty of negative connotations. Rather than lonely, reckless over-consumption, however, I typically find that drinking alone is an invitation to drink more attentively — because the outside chatter stops and the external stimulation is less intense — which inevitably, for me, means fewer sips. When I’m alone, as I’ve written before, I have more bandwidth to savor the wine and let it unfold, so that it shows me what it wants to show me.

Even for someone who loves the experience, drinking alone happens rarely. Drinking alone in a public space happens even less often, which is exactly why I’d like to hover for a moment over the special features of the places that do make such a unique and valued occasion possible.

That brings us back to Cuvee.

Timing Matters

Let’s be realistic. As a lone guest, I don’t want to take up a seat at a prime table during a wine bar or restaurant’s busiest (and most lucrative) hours. There’s always a stool at the bar, of course, and that evening other solo guests did in fact take advantage of those seats. There were also two-top tables open, however, and I wanted to do some writing which I find more comfortable at a table so that’s where I sat. No one seemed to mind.

Be heads-up about it, though. If you’re going in the evening, try to arrive before the dinner rush. (I took my seat at Cuvee around 5 pm.) If you take a table, and things start to get busy, don’t linger overly long. Common consideration, especially while alone, go a long way.

Engage the sommelier or bartender while it’s quiet.

At that early-ish time of evening, the staff is likely transitioning from day duties to dinner prep and set-up. They have things that need to get done — they always have things that need to get done — but you may also be one of relatively few guests, which gives each of you an opening to interact.

Over the course of a few hours, I enjoyed three glasses of wine at Cuvee (and an espresso right before heading back out into the rainy Belgian night). More importantly, though, the staff taught me something about each of the wines before they poured them: that the Optimbulles Robijn Rosé sparkling wine, for example, is one of Belgium’s own most award-winning bottles, and the Hey Gamin! Gamay from François Saint-Lô in the Loire — one of the most unruly and vivid gamays I’ve ever had in my life — comes from a tiny parcel about 25 kilometers south of Saumur that’s farmed by draft horse. (We went back the next day to buy the rest of their inventory — two bottles! — to bring back to the US.)

The draft horse and the award-winning Belgian wine are exactly the sort of details that I want to know about the wines that are in my glass, regardless of whether I’m drinking alone. It takes sensitive staff (which Cuvee can boast) to find the sweet spot of engaging a lone guest or not, but it’s that awareness that differentiates a place like Cuvee as a welcoming destination for where to drink alone.