Canal Cellars & Urban Vines: A Relaxed 2‑Day Wine-Focused Winter Getaway in Ghent, Belgium

The day begins with cold air on your face and the soft scrape of shoes over wet cobblestone as you cross into Ghent City Centre, where pointed gables lean in over narrow streets and the canal lies flat as glass. Morning is for context: STAM’s hushed galleries lay out the city like a layered map, old bricks and interactive projections whispering how a medieval trading hub turned into the design-conscious place you’re walking through now. By midday, you’re ready for something more tactile—Restaurant Vrijmoed’s plates arrive like small compositions, local vegetables and sauces painted across porcelain, the clink of stemware underscoring each course. Afternoon light slants low as you join a Legends of Gent walking tour, words and footsteps echoing off stone as you move past Saint Bavo’s and the Belfry, stories of dark alleys and guild wealth filling the gaps between sips you’ve had and ones you’re planning. Dinner shifts the focus fully to the glass: Parole Winebar & Co feels like a grown-up hideout, all warm wood, candlelight, and Slovenian orange wine catching the glow. The night ends a street or two away at Hey Frankie, where the playlist hums and the bar feels like a friend’s living room that just happens to have a killer cellar. Tomorrow, you’ll tug more deliberately at the city’s wine thread, but tonight you just let it wrap around you slowly.

Morning comes with the muffled toll of bells from Saint Bavo’s Cathedral and the faint smell of roasted beans drifting through narrow streets as you angle toward the Graslei. Today is about living in the seam between old stone and new obsessions: a quiet coffee at Barrazza, then a slow look at Saint Bavo’s and the Belfry so you can feel the weight of history before turning fully toward the glass. Lunch at Roots feels like eating in someone’s minimalist townhouse—soft light, pale wood, and plates that treat seasonal produce with the same seriousness as any grand cru. By afternoon, you’re on a very specific kind of treasure hunt, moving between Melanie’s World Of Wine And More, A Taste Affair, and Het Wijnhuis Gent, comparing labels and letting the shopkeepers steer you toward Belgian producers and offbeat bottles to bring home. Evening sharpens into a final, deliberate arc: dinner at Publiek, where the room hums with quiet concentration and the wine list rewards curiosity, then on to ONA Belfort or edelrot for one last glass of something cloudy, electric, and alive. You end back near Saint Michael’s Bridge, the canal black and glossy, feeling like you’ve mapped out a private version of Ghent that lives in your notebook and your palate.