Zurich's Wine Bars

The streets of this city are crowded with casual, convivial places to sip great wine. Our favorite is Oepfelchammer, a charming and quirky 210-year-old institution. Traditional Swiss dishes—calf's liver in sage butter; veal in mushroom cream sauce—are a fortifying prelude to a night of imbibing at the city's oldest Weinstube. Oepfelchammer has been favored for centuries by young intellectuals, who sip the easy-drinking local wines, like fruity rauschling and aromatic riesling-sylvaner blends, while engaging in arcane house rituals. For instance, to add one's mark to the hieroglyphic carvings scrawled on the walls, patrons must pull themselves up and over a ceiling beam and drink a glass of wine while hanging by their legs upside down.