Pintxos and Rioja, the Basque country's slower table

In the old town of San Sebastián, and in Bilbao's bars around the Plaza Nueva, eating out does not mean sitting down and choosing from a menu. It means standing at a bar crowded with small plates, pintxos, each usually built on a slice of bread and held together with a cocktail stick, and having one, with a small glass of something, before moving on to the next bar for a different one. A proper Basque evening might cover four or five establishments and involve very little actual sitting down. It is, despite the constant movement, one of the more unhurried ways to eat that exists in Europe, because nobody involved is trying to get anywhere quickly.

A concentration of ambition in a small city

San Sebastián, a city of under two hundred thousand people, has for decades held a concentration of serious, award-recognised restaurants that is startling for its size, the pintxos culture existing alongside a tier of formal dining that has helped make Basque cooking one of the more discussed regional cuisines in Europe. The relationship between the two is not incidental: several of the region's most decorated chefs learned their trade, or still keep a hand in, behind exactly the kind of bar where a pintxo costs the price of a coffee.

Bilbao, an hour or so up the coast, tells a related but different story. For most of the twentieth century, it was a heavy industrial and shipbuilding city with little reason to appear on a tourist itinerary. The Guggenheim Museum, its titanium panels curving along the Nervión river since 1997, changed that so thoroughly that the effect has its own shorthand among planners elsewhere, the "Bilbao effect," for what a single ambitious building can do to a city's reputation.

Vines an hour inland

South of Bilbao, the land dries out and rises into La Rioja, Spain's best-known wine region, where Tempranillo has been grown and the wine matured in oak since at least the Middle Ages; Haro's older bodegas date their underground cellars back centuries, cut deep enough into the rock to hold a steady temperature without any mechanical help. The walled medieval town of Laguardia, in the Rioja Alavesa, sits above a warren of its own wine cellars, some of them older than the buildings above them.

The region has its own architectural gesture, on a smaller scale than Bilbao's: at Elciego, the winery Marqués de Riscal commissioned Frank Gehry, the same architect behind the Guggenheim, to design a hotel whose ribboned titanium roof, in the colours of red wine, white wine and the surrounding foil-capped bottles, sits directly above centuries-old vine rows. It is the sort of coincidence that only makes sense once you have seen both buildings and worked out they share a signature.

Getting there without hurrying

This corner of Spain has never been the easiest to reach quickly, and that has rather worked in its favour: fewer travellers pass through on a tight schedule, and both the pintxos bars and the wine towns are used to a slower, more attentive kind of visitor. Fred. Olsen's week-long Regions of Northern Spain sails from Southampton directly to Bilbao, leaving time on either side of a shore visit to wander rather than tick off a list, while Travelsphere's escorted week through the Basque country and La Rioja covers both the coast and the vineyards over land, without requiring a hire car or a fixed idea of exactly how many bars is too many.

Either way, resist the urge to plan the food too precisely. The best pintxos bar of the evening is rarely the one that was recommended in advance; it is the one that happened to be busiest, or quietest, or simply nearest, when the appetite for the next small plate arrived. The same applies, at greater length and lower alcohol content, to choosing a bodega to visit in Rioja.

Treat it as one trip rather than two errands. The bar-hopping and the sitting-down dinner are, in the end, the same appetite for taking food seriously, expressed at two different speeds.