A Taste of Place

Where you check in is more than a place to lay your head: It’s your base in a destination and frames the way you see, feel and even taste it. We spotlight three hotels around the world where food and drink are not just part of the stay — they define it.

By Andrew Elkin

L’AND VINEYARDS

From Grape to Glass in Portugal

Pick, sip and even soak in the grapes growing all around you at this wine retreat in Portugal’s Alentejo region.

L’AND Vineyards overlooks a rolling landscape of olive groves and wheat fields about a one-hour drive east of Lisbon. “People come here to taste classic Portuguese wines and to understand how we produce them,” says Pedro Durand, the hotel’s head sommelier. Established in 2011, L’AND is a working winery and luxury hotel rolled into one: The 163-acre estate is home to 37 suites and six villas. Fifteen acres of grapevines produce the fruit for eight different wines, all of which are served and sold exclusively on the premises, such as the light and easy-drinking red wine made from mini-vineyards around the property.

Guests help in the harvest before celebrating it with a vineyard barbecue.

“There are more than 250 grape varieties native to Portugal,” says Durand, who has about 150 represented in the L’AND wine cellar. “Some wines on the list have 15 different grapes in them — and these are incredible wines.” The self-described contemporary wine retreat has a wine tourism program to rival any other, with a range of tastings and experiences available in-house and off-site. In the winery tasting room, guests can opt for focused tastings — the L’AND cuvées, a tour of Portugal, international classics — or enjoy a guided tasting at one of several nearby wineries. There are wine events, too, like the annual Harvest Celebration, which takes place in August, when guests can help pick grapes before enjoying a vineyard festa with live music and a barbecue (grilled scarlet prawns and spit-roasted black pig are on the menu). Even the spa is wine-themed: All treatments use the products of Austrian brand Vinoble Cosmetics, which employs grapeseed oil, polyphenols and other grape byproducts to revitalize skin and soul.

L’AND Vineyards’ architecture seamlessy fits with the rolling landscape around it.

This constellation of grapes is the perfect accompaniment to an evening of stargazing — another brilliant attraction at L’AND. The area around the property is a designated dark-sky preserve, making it an ideal spot to take in this summer’s Perseid meteor shower. You can even catch the celestial show from the comfort of your room: The property’s Sky View suites are equipped with oversize skylights above the beds.

Wine tasters learn to blend a wine, a Portuguese art form.

Over at the hotel’s Mapa restaurant, award-winning chef David Jesus designed the Caminhos tasting menu as a tribute to Portuguese explorers who followed the stars to faraway lands. The dishes blend regional ingredients with flavors from places like North Africa, Brazil and Japan — a few courses in, you might forget that you’re in Portugal. Then, along comes sommelier Durand with a carefully selected wine pairing, an elegant red balancing fruit and acidity, made from a grape native to the Alentejo region. It’s the L’AND Vineyards Touriga Nacional — the perfect reminder of exactly where you are.

Red mullet and Algarve shrimp with xeq xeq sauce — chef David Jesus’s ode to Goan flavors — features in the Caminhos tasting menu.

Wining and Dining Around the World

A CHIANTI FOOD AND WINE SAFARI IN IMPRUNETA, ITALY

Relais Villa Olmo is a boutique hotel in a 15thcentury farmhouse on the Diadema winery and olive oil farm. Its Chianti Food & Wine Safari experience lets guests immerse themselves in Chianti’s Big Five — wine, olive oil, walled villages, truffles and cheese — on a special backroads tour.

A DEEP DIVE INTO NAPA VALLEY VINTAGES IN ST. HELENA, CALIFORNIA

Expand your wine savvy with a stay at Meadowood Napa Valley, a hotel surrounded by vineyards. The Wine Center offers 12 on-site tastings and courses, a sommelier consultation to help plan your tasting-room itinerary and an insider’s tour with Meadowood experts.

SIGNATURE WINE TASTINGS IN PUNTA CANA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Let Eden Roc Cap Cana’s sommeliers take you on a tour of the world’s great wine regions, all from under the domed ceiling of the La Cava wine cellar. They’ll also pull a few choice bottles from thousands of French and Italian vintages to pair with your meal.

FOGO ISLAND INN

Foraging and Preserving on Fogo Island

Get a close-up view of the culinary traditions that have been a way of life for centuries on this remote island off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

“Almost everything that we serve here can be grown here,” says Timothy Charles, executive chef at Fogo Island Inn. The hotel kitchen sources 80 percent of its ingredients from the island and its surrounds, which is tricky, considering nothing much grows outdoors between November and May (the inn is perched on the edge of the North Atlantic 284 miles north of St. John’s, the provincial capital). When growing season arrives, it’s a frantic, yet fulfilling, job to corral, cook and can the ingredients of the moment. This summer, guests get to be a part of the action.

Fogo Island Inn combines radical design with traditional elements like the “shores” propping up two floors of guest rooms.

The inn’s Historical Foodways and Forging the Path Forward retreat gives visitors a taste of what it’s like to stock an award-winning culinary program in such a remote place. Over a five-day stay, guests meet local producers and see a hydroponic farm, an apiary and Newfoundland and Labrador’s first kelp farming pilot project. You can also forage for wild plants, visit the community’s historic root cellars and venture behind the scenes into the inn’s pan-seasonal larder: a cellar filled with 400 vinegars, syrups, condiments and preserves.

Chef Tim Charles with Alf Coffin in his island garden.

Any berry, blossom or leaf that can be gathered during one of the island’s “seven seasons” ends up in a jar, from spruce tips, sorrel and kelp stipes (spring) to bakeapples — also known as cloudberries — and strawberries (summer) to damson plums (fall, or berry season), root vegetables (late fall) and even fish. All this bounty will turn up on the inn’s menu throughout the year: A house-made vinegar might end up in a cocktail or a sauce. “It’s a pretty impressive arsenal we get to pull from,” says Charles.

The inn’s dining room is the vantage point for whale and iceberg spotting, all while enjoying a lovingly prepared meal.

Because guests are likely to have most of their meals prepared by the hotel kitchen (there simply aren’t many other options on the island), staff strive to keep the menu exciting. They operate a seven-day dinner menu, with three different mains offered each night. “We call it the cumulative dining experience,” Charles says. “All of the meals you eat relate to one another and leave you with a feeling that keeps stacking on itself and complementing the meals around it.”

A lunch of fresh scallop, lentil and carrot garnished with foraged yarrow.

An ecosystem of more than 50 on- and off-island suppliers supports that experience. (“The relationships are like friendships,” Charles says, “you’ve got to maintain them.”) This supply chain mirrors Fogo Island Inn’s role as a social enterprise: The inn operates on a profit-sharing model for its employees, and all revenues are recycled into the local economy through Shorefast, the charity that founded the inn as part of a holistic approach to help revitalize this outport fishing community.

Hands-on Foodie Adventures

FARM GARDEN TO KITCHEN TO PLATE IN PUERTO VARAS, CHILE

Experience what it’s like to farm — and cook — in Chilean Patagonia, a land of peaks, volcanoes, lakes and rivers. With Hotel AWA’s organic farm as your pantry, you’ll learn the basics of permaculture, harvesting the ingredients needed to prepare your lunch.

DISCOVER THE ART OF THE COCONUT IN RAA ATOLL, MALDIVES

Learn how the coconut, known here as the Miracle Tree, has a central role in Maldivian life, cooking and art. At Alila Kothaifaru Maldives in Raa Atoll, you’ll pick up the proper technique for climbing the tree to harvest its fruit, enjoy a mixology class (you put the lime in the coconut) and relax with a coconut-scented bath and massage.

FARM-TO-TABLE DINNERS IN MASSACHUSETTS, USA

Weekly dinners at Chatham Bars Inn take “farm to table” literally: Produce is picked, prepared and plated for guests amid the inn’s farm plots. Angling aficionados can charter a boat in search of striped bass, bluefish, black sea bass and little tunny. Once reeled in, the captain will clean and deliver your catch to the kitchen for your next meal.

ONE & ONLY NYUNGWE HOUSE

A Tea Lover’s Retreat in Rwanda

Revel in this resort’s tea plantation setting, partaking in everything from plucking leaves to brewing the perfect cuppa.

About 6,500 feet up in one of the world’s last montane rainforests, tea, tourism and biodiversity have combined for a reinvigorating brew: One&Only Nyungwe House, a boutique wellness resort set on a working tea plantation.

When pluckers from the local cooperative aren’t working in the garden (they come by almost daily to groom the tea plants), Nyungwe House staff leads guests in tours of the plantations, lessons in plucking tea leaves (later used by kitchen staff in garnishes and pestos) and demonstrations on how to make the perfect cup — using tea made at the nearby Gisakura Tea Factory.

A colobus monkey, one of several primate species that live in the rainforest around One&Only Nyungwe House.

Rwanda Mountain Tea is one of the country’s biggest exports and the tea grown on the property has been given over to the local cooperative, which sells the crop to the factory. This livelihood means they no longer need to poach animals from the rainforest to sustain themselves — it’s a mutually beneficial approach that enriches the community, the rainforest and the resort. (One&Only Nyungwe House also supports a nearby school for the tea pluckers’ children.)

African-inspired sweets pair perfectly with a freshly brewed cup in the Tea Lounge.

Beyond basking in the tranquility of the tea garden, guests benefit from the resort’s wellness program, with a full menu of spa treatments and yoga classes, plus a heated infinity pool overlooking the natural wonder next door. The Nyungwe rainforest predates the last ice age (Rwanda is close to the equator and was untouched) and is richly biodiverse: Many species of plants, reptiles and birds in the forest are found nowhere else on Earth.

Guest lodgings are set right in a working tea plantation.

“It’s a place that rejuvenates your body and soul,” says Eloi Ntsinzi, sales manager for One&Only Nyungwe House. “You are next to one of Africa’s oldest rainforests — the energy of that forest is something that I cannot describe. It’s something that you feel.”

Chefs at Nyungwe House spotlight Rwandan produce and local flavors.

The rainforest makes up Nyungwe National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2023, the only remaining refuge for some endangered animals, such as Hill’s horseshoe bat, and home to 13 different species of primates. Guests can register for a trek to see the chimpanzees in the park — “You have to be fit,” says Ntsinzi, since these chimpanzees are often on the move — or take the Meet the Monkeys hike to see colobus and L’Hoest’s monkeys in their natural habitat.

Then again, you could simply stay in place, absorb the surroundings and pour yourself another soothing cup of tea.

Tea Time from the U.K. to Japan

AFTERNOON TEA IN LONDON

NoMad London’s new tea menu proves that this interstitial meal still has a place in the 21st century: blue-cheese and sage scones, sandwiches of pastrami, daikon and mustard, and a list of the world’s most wanted singleorigin teas — all served under a soaring glass roof.

A SIGNATURE CEYLON RETREAT IN TANGALLE, SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka’s most famous export stars in this 120-minute sensory experience at Anantara Peace Haven Tangalle Resort that employs antioxidantrich Ceylon teas in skin scrubs and facials, as well as in a brew to sip after your Ayurvedic massage.

A TEA GARDEN ESCAPE IN KYOTO

A tea list from Kyoto-based supplier Ippodo Tea (established in 1717) and the Hyatt Regency Kyoto’s Japanese garden set the tone for Touzan restaurant’s tea menu, which goes from savory (marinated mackerel sandwiches) to sweet (uji matcha cheesecake) and includes the requisite scone, served with clotted cream and sweet black beans.

Ask your advisor about Ensemble Exclusive Amenities at the properties in this feature.