uvita

A drink from the Fun Fun

The Baar Fun Fun was opened on 12 December 1895 by Augusto López, a Galician, inside Montevideo’s old Mercado Central. According to El País and the founder’s great-grandson, the name came from López’s stammer: when friends urged him to open a bar, he kept asking whether it would work, “¿fun… fun… funcionará?”. The great-grandson, Gonzalo Acosta López, has said the double a in Baar was meant to set it apart from other bars.

The bar has moved several times within the Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo’s old town. When the old market was put out to tender for redevelopment, bidders had to keep the Fun Fun because of its symbolic value in the city’s collective memory, and in 2019 the bar returned to the site, beside the new regional headquarters of the development bank CAF.

A secret recipe

Uvita is the Spanish diminutive of uva, grape, and its recipe has stayed in the family. El Observador describes the formula as a closely guarded secret of the creator’s descendants, and Montevideo Portal calls Gonzalo Acosta López the great-grandson of the creator of the famous Uvita, with four generations of the family running the bar. According to Montevideo Portal, the drink is a blend of garnacha wine and port, in a proportion and with an ageing that the family keeps secret.

For most of its history Uvita could only be bought at the bar. In 2013, Bodegas del Uruguay reported that Acosta López had begun bottling it for supermarkets with the family winery Juan Toscanini e Hijos, which supplies the wine base while he adds the rest himself. He described two versions: the original sweet Uvita and a bitter one, previously made by cutting the sweet drink with caña amarga in the glass.

El País records that the Fun Fun once had three signature drinks: Uvita, Pegulo and Miguelito. Citing the chronicler Armando Olveira Ramos, it says Pegulo disappeared when grafión, a cherry-like fruit it needed, could no longer be found in Uruguay; Miguelito, also gone, was a short, mild drink for children. Uvita is the one that survived.

Gardel and the tin counter

A signed photograph of Carlos Gardel, dated 1933 and dedicated to López as the champion of Pegulo and Uvita, is displayed in the bar. The bar’s tradition holds that, during a visit that year, Gardel tasted Uvita and then sang a tango unaccompanied while leaning on its old tin counter. After five moves, the Fun Fun still keeps that counter.

The bar still stages tango shows, and Montevideo Portal calls it the cathedral of tango. In Emblem World, Uvita sits in the Uruguay drink collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.