This often neglected city (despite being Greece’s second largest) should be visited by anyone planning a trip to the country — not just for its incredible store of Byzantine art but also for its beaches, tavernas, fortified city, and friendly if exotic ambience.

A typical Byzantine icon depicting Jesus and the Virgin Mary. (Photograph by James Conaway)

After all, this was once the gateway — depending on which direction you were headed — to Asia, the Balkans, and Athens and the Peloponnesus to the south. And you don’t have to be a believer to appreciate the painting and the mosaics that often adorn the walls of churches, basilicas, and monasteries. They’re made more potent by their very survival and by intricacies of craft so exacting and time consuming that they are almost unfathomable today.

Two-dimensional, austere, alien, these masterpieces are also intensely mysterious, even frightening. Faces of apostles, Jesus, Mary, and assorted saints and angels appear as deer caught in the headlights of now. The problem that arises from staring into their big, soulful eyes is that you, too, become exposed to the passions of a complicated, often violent past — and to a spirituality palpable even if you believe in nothing at all.

This is the lost world of Constantinople (now Istanbul), much of which was lost to invasion and physical destruction but is here preserved — at least in part. These gilded or kaleidoscopic surfaces, like the minds of artists and saints behind them, may seem impenetrable, but look at them for a couple of days running, as I just did, and an entirely different impression emerges. These gorgeous relics of a vital past tell a real story about the survival of the Greco-Roman tradition that essentially defines what we think of as “the West.”

At a time when history could have taken a very different turn, the Byzantine civilization so well represented in Thessaloniki forestalled the Muslim invasion of Europe from the east by a millennium. In the process it strengthened the Greco-Roman tradition and helped define institutions — that we now take for granted — as far away as America.

Many such treasures from Thessaloniki, Athens, and elsewhere in Greece never before seen outside that country are coming to Washington, D.C. this October. They’re part of a unique exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, not just icons and mosaics but also rare glass work, jewelry, implements, sacred objects, frescoes and more.

James Conaway is a featured contributor for Intelligent Travel and writes for other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog and check out his latest book, Nose.

Wine’s complexity, I learned, was greater than I imagined, with chemical components that actually justified descriptors like “buttery” and “briary.”

And I learned that wine’s origins are closely aligned with our own. Making and selling the stuff, for one thing, must be at least the world’s third oldest profession.

An ongoing interest in wine inevitably entails close encounters with stunning landscapes and fascinating people. A mere interest in wine broadens the traveler in unique ways and enriches any trip that touches on it. Nowadays that means not just visiting some part of the global vineyard, but also sharing in the rich social heritage of this ancient tradition.

Wine making and the people who do it have changed in recent years. Nowadays to own a winery means belonging to an international trade with great bona fides, as well as sharing some traits of an ancient European royalty dedicated to quality and culture.

As a budding wine enthusiast who wrote about wine, I found myself involved in wine’s sometimes all-too-human side — where, beyond mere sensory perception, a constant battle is waged for good reviews and scores, higher “price-points,” and increased sales.

This dawned on me when I came to Napa, like everybody else, to see what the fuss was all about and came away convinced that the valley contained a true American subculture.

This was unique then in the U.S, which came relatively late to an appreciation of fine wine. Eventually I wrote two nonfiction books about it – Napa, and The Far Side of Eden – but even then there was much I still hadn’t divulged, including my own ideas about how landed families are affected by the sudden notoriety successful wine-making can bring. And how a suddenly coveted – and priceless – locale can see the destruction of farmland upon which its reputation is built.

That included epic battles over preserving the place itself, and larger-than-life characters straight out of America’s Gilded Age colliding with environmental proponents, a classic American story that is now taking place all over the world.

Each wine-producing region teaches its own lessons to visitors, and for those striving to write about it, and I eventually came to the realization that fiction has advantages over journalism when dealing with this world.

Novels give free reign to the imagination and allow surprising and quite wonderful revelations to surface have sat unexpressed for years. This is because they either defy documentation or involve intensely private relationships that only a novel can do justice to.

The result, in my case, was a novel called Nose that began to flow unexpectedly from my computer over a year ago as I sat alone on the couch with a view of Napa’s rugged Mayacamas mountain range in front of me.

My life hasn’t been the same since, and after it’s published next week, I intend to plunge back into the depthless pool of wine-related fiction. In fact, I already have.

Featured contributor James Conaway writes for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

It was the only tasting I have ever attended where half the participants carried weapons. They wore dirks — daggers — either on their belts or thrust into the tops of their knee-length stockings. “This is a sgian dubh,” said the man next to me, drawing his dagger and placing it on the table. “It means ‘black knife’ in Gaelic. The blade was blackened by the peat smoke, you know.”

He was a ghillie laird. Don’t ask me exactly what a ghillie laird is, but he and others belonged to a club devoted to tasting single-malt scotches and they had gathered to sample three vintages from the Macallan distillery. If you think this a casual enterprise then try to pronounce the club’s name, Cuideagh o’ Corn o’ Uisghebeathe (roughly, “tasters of the water of life”).

The ghillie laird had more to tell me, but the bagpipes got in the way. He stood up, smoothed his kilt, and went off for a chunk of smoked salmon. I ate another oatcake to mop off my taste buds, concentrating on the task at hand: evaluating the heady peats before me while keeping a clear head.

The whisky industry is no longer in precipitous decline and sales of single-malt scotch have romped for a couple of decades now. Its popularity reflects the heightened awareness of quality among drinkers of everything from tequila to cognac — and a willingness to pay for it.

The Glenmorangie distillery was founded in 1843. (Photograph by Sandy Buchanan, Flickr)

“Single-malt,” as virtually everyone knows these days, simply means the whisky that comes from a single producer. The process enjoys more latitude than you might think, and the results, though they all taste like scotch, are as various as the components: malted barley, peat smoke, in some cases old sherry or bourbon casks, good water, and a certain je ne sais quoi.

According to one Cuideagh o’ Corn o’ Uisghebeathe enthusiast, when the Japanese attempted to assemble their own “scotch” over there, with ingredients – including water — imported from Scotland, they roundly failed.

There are more than a hundred scotch distilleries in Scotland, most of them tiny. The scotch Americans are most familiar with is blended, and comes mostly from the Lowlands. They’re lighter in appearance than single malts, sometimes with caramel color dumped in to make them look “authentic,” and generally taste more or less the same.

On the other hand, single malts, which come from the Highlands and Scotland’s west coast, are highly individualistic. Devotees collect vintages of single malts, and trade them like well-ranked Bordeaux.

Scotch is made from barley that has been germinated in water, kiln-roasted, and subjected to peat smoke in varying degrees. It’s then “mashed” and soaked in water again to liquefy the starches and convert them to sugar, and fermented like beer or wine. The resulting brew goes into a pot still that eventually produces a clear spirit of about 140 proof. Later, spring water is added. The whisky will already bear the taste of the cooking and the peat.

But another palatable element is yet to come – oak — which adds more taste and color. Traditionally scotch was aged in casks that had been used to ship sherry, yielding a lovely symbiosis. The advent of tankers for bulk shipment made sherry casks rarer and more costly, so most scotch found its way into old bourbon barrels brought over from the States. These became the most common cooperage for scotch, but some of the good single-malt distillers still use sherry casks. Producers like Macallan made arrangements with Spanish sherry houses that supply them with staves imbued with the taste of Amontillado and Oloroso.

Which brings me back to the glasses lined up before me. In addition to the three Macallan vintages — aged 12, 18, and 25 years — a fourth glass contains a 10-year-old Glenmorangie, one of Scotland’s most popular single malts.

I learned that the way to smell any strong spirit is to pass the glass under your nose twice at most. The Macallans were “lightly peated” and lacked the oily quality of heavier single malts made in the west of Scotland, which I discovered on a trip to the inner Hebrides and will write about another time.

Single malts produced by Lagavulin and Laphroaig, neighbor distilleries on the isle of Islay (pronounced “Eye-lay”), smell vaguely of tea and iodine derived from the vast ocean on their doorsteps. The older ones are a deep amber, with a sweetish, complex nose. A more lightly peated — and less expensive — single-malt from Islay is Bowmore.

Finally, single malts taste better with a dollop of (un-chlorinated!) water. And forget about an ice cube if you find yourself in the presence of a single-malt partisan wearing a sgian dubh.

Featured contributor James Conaway writes for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

The boxing paintings are riveting at close range, the brush stokes broad and immediate, yet when you stand back, the arrested ferocity and pathos merge seamlessly. This sweeping show is unique in that it’s made up of the best of Bellows’s total output of some 1,000 paintings and drawings, remarkable since he died in his early forties from a ruptured appendix that, in an odd way, seems prefigured by the violence of the ring.

"Blue Morning" inadvertently presaged the birth of the modern preservation movement. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

But Bellows could be lyrical and wonderfully evocative of the streets, too, and the remnants of nature coexisting there. My favorite Bellows is “Blue Morning,” which depicts the construction site of Manhattan’s original Pennsylvania Station in 1909. Light and an azure haze seem to move in tandem, while laborers huddle in the foreground and, overhead, the elevated railroad beams frame the scene in immutable iron.

Ironically, that gorgeous Beaux-Arts building was demolished in 1963 to make way for the eyesore that’s the current Penn Station. The battle to save the structure pitted its fans against city levelers and gave birth to the modern preservation movement, so there’s inadvertent history loaded into the artist’s brush as well.

See the first comprehensive exhibition of Bellows’s career in more than thirty years in Washington through October 8, 2012. The exhibit will then travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (November 15, 2012–February 18, 2013), and close out its tour at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (March 16–June 9, 2013).

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

The restaurant was inspired by the Works Progress Administration writers’ project of the 1930s, with fare derived from classic American recipes. It’s also linked thematically with an exhibition at the near-by National Archives, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?: The Government’s Effect on the American Diet,” with some profits from the restaurant dedicated to the Archives.

This is a genuinely unique idea for presenting food and, ironically, one that seems not to have occurred to American restaurateurs in this historically-minded city.

The food – like the descriptions and historic provenance – is thorough and imaginative, and absolutely delicious: grilled butter oysters (New York, 1825); vermicelli prepared like pudding (Philadelphia, 1802); hush puppies with homemade sorghum butter (the South, generally), shrimp étouffée (lower Mississippi delta), BBQ beef short-ribs with Hoppin’ John (Carolinas, 1847), and pecan pie (southeastern seaboard, 1700s).

Joan Miro's "Head of a Catalan Peasant." (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

If you want to try these tasty treats and Andrés’s iterations of other classic American dishes you’ll have to do so before July 4th, when America Eats Tavern is scheduled to close, before — Presto! — opening as something else.

Meanwhile, just a skip down Pennsylvania Avenue at the National Gallery of Art, Andrés is putting his masterful mark on dishes from Catalonia to complement the current exhibit there, “Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape” (through August 12). This rare gathering of the artist’s fascinating oeuvre is rooted in the sensuality and romance not of America but of Miro’s – and Andrés’ – native land, and is not to be missed. Neither are the delectable dishes on display at the gallery’s Garden Café.

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

Itō Jakuchū's "Peonies and Butterflies"

You’ve seen versions of this print everywhere from surf shops to art museums, and now you can see the real thing at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery on the Mall in Washington D.C.

Don’t miss it, part of a stunning exhibition of all of Hokusai’s prints in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. First published in 1831 and a milestone in Japanese art, Hokusai’s innovative composition emphasizes landscape in a new, vital way. (On display through mid-June).

The mountain remains a constant in this affecting panorama of various aspects of 19th-century Japanese life, part of a larger exhibition of Hokusai’s work in the adjoining Freer Gallery (Hokusai: Japanese Screens, and Paintings and Drawings).

For a continuation of this extraordinary, literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, skip across the Mall to the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art for the exhibit, Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu.

Never before shown outside Japan, these 30 gorgeous scrolls are masterpieces on silk and another milestone in the inspirational power of nature and technical innovation in Japanese art. (On display through April 29).

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

Symbolically, Washington’s cherry trees are already in bloom, ten days early, as the Japanese ambassador pointed out at the ceremony for this year’s winner of the Polly Krakora Award for artistry in film. It went to Academy-Award-nominated director Lucy Walker for The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, an alternately riveting and sad film about the 2011 disaster and its aftermath that manages to avoid difficult questions.

After the ceremony, one exasperated viewer stood to ask if there was evidence that building on Japan’s coastal plain would be prevented in the future, something neither the ambassador nor the director addressed. Yet it’s clear from the film that the clean-up and disposal of waste from last year’s devastating tsunami has caused a second, equally dire environmental disruption.

Film still from Wild By Law. Photo courtesy Florentine Films

The vast majority of the films on display at the festival (many of which are premieres), however, bring riveting and entertaining attention to explicitly environmental problems. There’s something for everyone here, from Wild By Law (which presents the story of the Wilderness Act‘s creation) to Wild Scandinavia. Other don’t-miss features include California Forever: Parks and the Future, Shattered Sky, and Aral: The Lost Sea.

Ken Burns will even be on hand on the festival’s final day to present a special sneak preview of his upcoming documentary, The Dust Bowl.

The screening locations themselves — from the National Archives to the AFI Silver – will take you around the city and beyond and amount to another, fascinating historical and architectural tour of the nation’s capital.

Film still from California Forever. Photo courtesy Backcountry Pictures

For more information about the Environmental Film Festival, visit dcenvironmentalfilmfest.org.

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

Those sheep aren’t moving because they’re made of flat, poly-chromed steel, droll heralds of a very different Napa Valley attraction (and one you should see before heading north to the more familiar tourist-oriented Napa). The di Rosa preserve is an astonishingly rich sensory experience and a journey through a vibrant Bay Area art scene from the 1950s to the present. This mother lode of painting, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and installations will, quite simply, stun you — and, if it doesn’t, you need life support.

The di Rosa, reason enough to wind your way north from the Golden Gate, is probably the largest collection of significant regional art in the country, featuring work by every artist you should know about from the Bay Area – William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Deborah Butterfield, Paul Kos, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown and many, many others. If you don’t know about them, don’t sweat it: part of the charm of di Rosa is its movable feast of discovery.

One of David Best's Rhinocars (Photo: James Conaway)

The provenance of the preserve itself is also interesting. Rene di Rosa was a Yale graduate who came west in the ‘50s, worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, knew all those Beats we’ve heard about and most everybody else, quit his job – that’s what you did in the ’60s — and moved to Carneros to write a novel. But he was more smitten by the art all around him than anything else, and he had both the presence of mind, and some financial wherewithal, to collect it.

He was also generous of spirit, and encouraged young artists at the center of a tempestuous and still resonant time. Among the work on display is a toy-encrusted “Rhinocar,” by David Best, a vintage Oldsmobile with a rhinoceros head for a grill. No child can resist it. And right next to it is the current show, new work by the painter Hung Liu, vibrant, laminated oils of Chinese subjects.

"Enmity," by Hung Liu (Photo: James Conaway)

The long historical throw of the di Rosa is apparent in several wonderful gallery spaces, but any sensible visitor will want to take the jitney tour — kids go free — which will take you through the grounds and the peacock-patrolled house where di Rosa lived with Veronica, his wife, a water colorist and sculptor who created the steel sheep that greet you upon arrival.

Di Rosa was an environmentalist before that term had cache and, with money acquired from selling off vineyards, constructed the preserve, complete with a 35-acre lake enhanced by a palm-treed island, and a vast sculpture garden that leads you past “Poetry House 4” by Alan Shepp, “Cactus Garden” by Gordon Huether, “Roller” by William Warenham, and “For Veronica” by Mark di Suvero, which catches the afternoon light, yet another luminous reminder that there’s more to Napa than wine.

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications that are devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more from James on his wine blog.

Last weekend, attendees walked into a gorgeous, historic edifice called Greystone, just north of St. Helena, a town that once housed a wine cooperative and is today the western headquarters of the Culinary Institute of America. After swishing up an elaborate staircase, the oenophiles tasted barrel samples of special cuvées (blends) made just for this event and wolfed down wild mushroom risotto and grass-fed beef sliders, then trekked across to the auction hall to wave paddles in crazed semaphore, majorly lightening their wallets in the process.

Greystone. (Photo: James Conaway)

You’re allowed inside only if you’re an insider, the ultimate wine country catch-22. Some lucky journalists, however, were permitted to bear witness to a ritual that transcends wine and, occasionally, reason. One of this year’s most expensive lots — five cases of 2009 cab from Dana Estates — sold for $70 thousand. In total, only 200 small lots of fought-over wine brought in more than $3 million.

How, you’re asking, can that outlay be justified by flinty-eyed distributors, restaurateurs, and collectors in a world beaten by economic headwinds and political uncertainty? The answer is, as in the world of fine art, limited supply — and the allure of connoisseurship. Just as a limited print from a well-known artist often brings in big money, bottles of these one-time blends from discreet vineyards attract those obsessed about owning, and tasting, rare wine. Toss in the large residual value of bragging rights and the sheer, if stunningly costly, pleasure of pulling a cork in one of these dark, lithe silhouettes, and you understand the attraction.

The auction’s a stroke of marketing genius by the Napa Valley Vintners Association, the promotional arm of winery owners that gets half its funding from two frantic hours in Greystone every year — and indirectly gives another boost to prices that may seem impossibly high until they’re compared with those of a first-growth Bordeaux or the best wines of Burgundy and Champagne.

Smell-a-vision station. (Photo: James Conaway)

The auction attendees are another rare extravagance, as sensuous as the product they depend on. At Raymond Vineyards, women danced overhead on steel runways, wearing feathers and little else, while guests fed from an inexhaustible raw bar and a “smell-a-vision” (decanters fitted with atomizers) sprayed the essence of wine aromas into their willing nostrils. Everywhere there was good wine, good food and the implication that, yes, it would go on forever.

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications that are devoted to travel, history, and culture.

The old stove in Miro's farmhouse. (Photo: Deborah Ziska)

The Mirós’ house (just a few miles outside the Mont-Roig town center) isn’t open to the public, but an exception was made, and I was able to see the faded interior, with its forlorn clock on the landing and an iron stove in the kitchen where no doubt a lot of classic Catalan dishes were prepared. The eucalyptus tree that dominates the painting is gone now, but lives on elsewhere, in oil on canvas. “The Farm” was bought (on the installment plan) by none other than Ernest Hemingway — when artist and writer, both expatriates, were still working out their crafts — and hung for a time in his Finca Vigia in Cuba. Today the piece belongs to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., having been gifted by Hemingway’s fourth wife, and widow, Mary.

The Catalonian farmhouse itself, surrounded by fields and close to a super highway, is in poor condition, which is surprising given Miró’s fame. But plans are afoot to salvage the property and make it more generally accessible. I hope all visitors will eventually be able to experience firsthand this vital remnant of the Catalan life and landscape. Meanwhile a small Miró museum in nearby Mont-Roig has brought together photographs, farm implements and other mementos, including a sweet little diorama of the scene in “The Farm,” which knowledgeable town matrons will tell you about with enthusiasm.

Calcots, a local specialty. (Photo: Deborah Ziska)

A local restaurant will also serve you, in season, the Catalan favorite, “calcots,” long sweet onions roasted over fire and dipped in a fantastic sauce made of ground almonds, hazelnuts, tomato, and local olive oil and peppers. Catalonia being a land of high-intensity protein, lunch also includes blood sausage, pork sausage, grilled chicken spread with aoli, sliced salami and olive oil on bread — finished off with local Penedes red wine and crema Catalan (crème brûlée) the size of a salad plate.

The next day, back in Barcelona — where Miró was born and stayed off and on for years — a head cold couldn’t deter me from visiting the Miró Museum (Fundació Joan Miró) atop its bright, airy perch overlooking the city. I wasn’t distracted that evening, either, from the pureed cauliflower and white chocolate with sliced octopus and capers dusted with smoked paprika and a dab of olive oil, which I helped prepare in the cooking school, “Cook & Taste,” or the onion soup with a pouch of blanched spinach leaf containing a soft-boiled egg yolk, or the bitter chocolate mousse with extra virgin olive oil and salt flakes, or the…

You get the idea. Catalonia – countryside, city, food, wine, and people – remains one of the most mysterious and gratifying places on earth. Peeling back its layers would take a lifetime, and is a worthy task, with Miró’s life and work as good a place as any to start. In May, the National Gallery will bring an unprecedented number of Miró’s works to the U.S. which is sure to reignite passion and curiosity about this Catalan colossus and the unique, culturally rich land from which he sprang.

James Conaway is a featured contributor on Intelligent Travel, and writes freelance for National Geographic Traveler and other publications that are devoted to travel, history, and culture.