Tunisia Drink Guide
From the hillside vineyards of Cap Bon and the cellars of Mornag to fig-brandy distilleries and the mint-tea cafés of Sidi Bou Said — Tunisia's drinking culture stretches back nearly three thousand years.
It begins with a name. Two centuries before Christ, a Carthaginian agronomist called Mago wrote a 28-volume treatise on agriculture and viticulture. When Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, the city's libraries were burned — with one exception. Mago's manual was carried back across the Mediterranean and translated into Latin by order of the Roman Senate. His vineyards on the slopes between Tunis and Cap Bon had already been producing wine for more than five hundred years.
The vines survived empires. They survived the Arab conquest, the Ottomans, and the French protectorate that revived large-scale production from the 1880s. Today Tunisia has seven Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée zones, around 14,000 hectares under vine, and a small handful of serious estates making rosé, red and white wines that visitors can taste at the source. Then there are the spirits that exist almost nowhere else — Boukha, the clear fig brandy that became the national drink; Thibarine, the herbal monastery liqueur from the northern hills; Cédratine, the bright citron liqueur made from the ancient ancestor of the lemon — and Celtia, the pale lager that has dominated the country's beer market since 1951.
And underneath all of it: a coffee and mint-tea culture inherited from the Ottomans and refined for four centuries in marble-floored cafés tucked into the medina. Here is where to drink in Tunisia.
This guide contains information about alcoholic beverages and is intended for adults of legal drinking age in their country.
Wine — Vineyards & Cellars
Tunisia produces around 40 million bottles a year across seven AOCs — with more than 80% of production concentrated on the Cap Bon peninsula. Rosé dominates (around 65% of output), but the country's serious wines are the structured reds and aromatic whites coming from a handful of estates in Mornag, Bouargoub, Korba and Grombalia.
Cap Bon & AOC Mornag
The Cap Bon peninsula juts out into the Mediterranean toward Sicily — a vast orchard of vineyards, olive groves and citrus, cooled by sea breezes that protect the vines from the summer sirocco. The AOC Mornag stretches from Grombalia and Takelsa in the north down to Enfidha in the south, and east to Korba. It is the heart of Tunisian wine: clay-limestone soils, mineral subsoils, and a mosaic of plots that lets producers blend across styles. Around 80% of the country's entire vineyard sits here.
Key grapes: Syrah · Carignan · Grenache · Mourvèdre · Cabernet Sauvignon · Merlot · Muscat d'Alexandrie · Chardonnay · Vermentino
Les Vignerons de Carthage — Magon
Jebel Jelloud / Mornag
Founded in 1948 as the UCCV cooperative after phylloxera devastated the Cap Bon vineyards, Les Vignerons de Carthage today farms around 9,000 hectares and produces close to two-thirds of all Tunisian wine. The Magon range — named after the Carthaginian agronomist — is the flagship: Vieux Magon (an aged Carignan-Syrah from old vines, raised 12 months in French oak then 24 in bottle), Magon Blanc (100% Vermentino), and the rosé-leaning Gris de Tunisie. Their historic cellar "La Fontaine aux Mille Amphores" in Mégrine sits south of Tunis, and is the centrepiece of most organised wine days in the country.
🍷 AOC Mornag · 🍺 Reds, whites, rosés · 📍 Route de Mornag, Jebel Jelloud, near Tunis
Visit Les Vignerons de Carthage →
Kurubis
Korba, Cap Bon
Built around an EU-backed Sicilian-Tunisian collaboration, Kurubis takes its name from the Roman village of Korba — a promontory facing Sicily across the sea. Founder and oenologist Didier Cornillon works with growers in micro-terroirs around Zango, Haut Bouargoub and Hammamet, matching Syrah, Merlot, Muscat and Chardonnay to specific marls, sandstones and limestones. The result is a small, focused range of wines under the AOC Mornag with an explicit commitment to cleaner, lower-intervention viticulture — rare in Tunisia. The wines have travelled with the official Magon wine itinerary that runs from Carthage out across Cap Bon.
🍷 AOC Mornag · 🌿 Cleaner viticulture · 📍 Korba, Cap Bon peninsula
Visit Kurubis →
Ceptunes
El Karmia, Grombalia (AOC Mornag)
A family-owned estate near the Mediterranean, on limestone and clay soils inside the AOC Mornag. Ceptunes is one of the small handful of private Tunisian producers to have built an international reputation — they were among the first wines from the country to land on American shelves through Travis Wine Imports. The range covers fresh Chardonnay, an aromatic dry Muscat of Alexandria, and the Didona red — a Cabernet Sauvignon-Syrah blend with dark fruit, leather and cedar that has become the house's calling card. Family means family here: the project survives on the owners' passion rather than profit.
🍷 AOC Mornag · 🍷 Didona red flagship · 📍 El Karmia, Grombalia
Visit Ceptunes →
Domaine Le Brignon — Bougène
Bouargoub, Cap Bon
A small Swiss-Tunisian estate on the hillsides of Bouargoub, between the gulfs of Tunis and Hammamet — squarely inside the historic AOC Mornag, classified for vine-growing since 1890. Bougène works strict low yields (5 to 6 tonnes per hectare), harvests entirely by hand in the cool hours of early morning, and uses very little fertiliser. The range is short and deliberate: a 100% Vermentino white (Bougène Blanc), a Grenache-led Rosé, the Bougène Rouge (Grenache and Mourvèdre), the Cuvée Spéciale (Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon) and the Bougène Réserve. Visits and tastings are arranged directly with the family.
🍷 AOC Mornag · ✊ Hand-harvested, low yields · 📍 25 min from Hammamet, 45 min from Tunis
Visit Domaine Le Brignon →Grombalia & AOC Sidi Salem
Thirty kilometres inland from the coast, the hills of Khanguet rise to about 300 metres — high enough to catch cool maritime breezes coming off the gulf, low enough to keep the long, warm growing season that Mediterranean grapes need. This is the AOC Sidi Salem, the appellation that gave Tunisia its first major modern wine revival. The Neferis valley, named after the Carthaginian fortified city that once stood here, has been planted with vines for over two thousand years.
Key grapes: Syrah · Carignan · Cinsault · Grenache · Pedro Ximénez · Chardonnay · Muscat of Alexandria · Touriga Nacional
Domaine Neferis
Khanguet, Grombalia (AOC Sidi Salem)
Replanted in 2000 on land where the first French vineyard was laid in 1878 by Émile Lançon, Domaine Neferis is widely regarded as the most important quality estate in Tunisia. 135 hectares of Syrah, Carignan, Merlot, Grenache, Marselan, Chardonnay, Viognier and Pedro Ximénez sit on the hills of Khanguet, 30 km from the Mediterranean. The winemaker is Samia Benali, the only active female oenologist in the country. Their flagship Carignan-Syrah blend — made in an Amarone-style with grapes dried for almost two months — is the closest thing Tunisia has to a wine of true international stature. Visits combine vineyard walks, cellar tours, tastings and lunches.
🍷 AOC Sidi Salem · 🍷 Tasting & vineyard walks · 📍 Khanguet, near Grombalia, 40 min south of Tunis
Visit Domaine Neferis →🍷 Tunisian Wine Tips
- Visits to Tunisian estates are almost always by appointment — contact the producer directly by email or phone, ideally a week or two ahead
- The simplest way to see several producers in a day is a guided Mornag wine tour from Tunis or Hammamet — most include cellar visits, vineyard walks and a wine-and-cheese tasting
- Rosé makes up around 65% of Tunisian production and is genuinely good: the Gris de Tunisie style is pale, dry and built for grilled fish and Mediterranean lunches
- The most ambitious reds are the Carignan-Syrah blends from Neferis and Ceptunes, and the old-vine Vieux Magon from Les Vignerons de Carthage — all worth seeking out
- Outside the wine regions and tourist resorts, restaurants serving alcohol are surprisingly rare — check ahead, or eat in hotel restaurants in Tunis, Hammamet, Sousse or La Marsa
- The country's wines are mostly sold inside Tunisia — visiting the estates is genuinely the best (sometimes the only) way to taste the top cuvées
Spirits — Boukha, Thibarine, Cédratine & Lagmi
Tunisia's distilling tradition is anchored in four distinctive drinks: a clear fig brandy that became the country's national spirit, a herbal monastery liqueur from the northern hills, a bright citrus liqueur made from cédrat (the parent fruit of all lemons), and a fermented palm sap that still flows from oasis trees in the south. None of them are made anywhere else in the world.
Boukha Bokobsa
Originally La Soukra, Tunis
Tunisia's national spirit. Yaakov Bokobsa arrived in Tunisia with a portable still in 1820, and within a generation his grandson Abraham had turned the distillation of Mediterranean figs into an industry — building a factory in La Soukra outside Tunis in 1880 and introducing the iconic square bottle that still defines the category. Boukha is a clear, unaged eau-de-vie distilled from fermented figs, with no additives at all: just figs, water and time. It is traditionally drunk neat and very cold, before or after a meal, and is the secret ingredient in the Soviva cocktail (with Thibarine, orange juice and grenadine). The brand is now produced in France but the name and the legend belong to Tunisia.
🥃 37.5–40% ABV · 🥕 100% fig eau-de-vie · 📍 Family origin: La Soukra, Tunis
Visit Boukha Bokobsa →
Boukha Habib (Boukha Soleil & Boukha Gold)
Distillerie Félix Habib & Cie, Ben Arous
Bokobsa's main rival on the Tunisian market and, unlike Bokobsa, still distilled inside Tunisia. Félix Habib & Cie has been making fig brandy at its plant in the Ben Arous industrial zone south of Tunis since 1940, working with sun-dried Mediterranean figs that are rehydrated and double-distilled to an unaged white spirit. There are two main labels: Boukha Soleil (the standard 37.5% ABV everyday bottle) and the slightly more refined Boukha Gold. Tunisian drinkers tend to split into camps — Bokobsa loyalists call it cleaner, Habib drinkers say it tastes warmer, with a touch more dried fig and a longer finish. The distillery itself is closed to the public but the bottles are everywhere: Monoprix, Carrefour, every duty-free counter at Tunis-Carthage airport.
🥃 36–37.5% ABV · 🥕 Fig eau-de-vie · 🏭 Distilled in Tunisia · 📍 Ben Arous, Greater Tunis
Cédratine
Félix Habib & Cie, Ben Arous
Tunisia's signature citrus liqueur, made by macerating the peel of the cédrat — the thick-skinned, intensely aromatic citron that is the ancient ancestor of the lemon — in grape alcohol with sugar. The result is bright yellow, deeply perfumed and 36 to 40% ABV: cleaner and more elegant than Italian limoncello, with a long bittersweet finish that comes from the cédrat's oil-rich rind. It is produced by Félix Habib & Cie alongside their Boukha, following a recipe inherited from a North African monastery in the early 20th century. Cédratine is also popular across the Mediterranean (especially in Corsica), but Tunisia remains the historic home. Serve it well-chilled as a digestif, neat or over ice with a slice of lemon — or use it to lift a gin and tonic.
🥃 36–40% ABV · 🍋 Cédrat (citron) peel maceration · 🍸 Drink ice-cold as digestif
Know Your Tunisian Spirits
Three distinctively Tunisian drinks that you will see on bar menus and supermarket shelves — and almost nowhere else in the world.
All three are widely available in Tunisian supermarkets, duty-free shops and hotel bars. Bokobsa — the leading Boukha brand — is now distilled in France; Thibarine is still produced from northern Tunisian grapes. Lagmi is rarely sold commercially: it is best tried in the oasis towns of the Jerid.
Beer — Celtia & the Story of SFBT
Tunisia is the largest beer producer in the entire Middle East and North Africa region — ahead of Algeria and Egypt — and almost all of it flows from a single company and a single brand.
The story starts not with a brewer but with a young Luxembourgish engineer called Joseph Baldauff, who arrived in Tunis in 1889 — the French protectorate was eight years old — and set up a small business making blocks of ice for the city's butchers. The company became the Société Frigorifique et Brasserie de Tunis: refrigeration first, brewery second. In 1925 he built a maltings and brewery alongside the ice plant. In 1951, with independence five years away, the brewery launched a Pilsner-style pale lager designed to compete with imported European beers. Robert Palomba was vice-president at the time; the name came from his wife's suggestion. They called it Celtia.
Three quarters of a century later, Celtia — with its red-and-white label, Gothic typeface and checkered crest borrowed from the national flag — controls roughly 85 to 95% of the Tunisian beer market. SFBT also brews Stella locally and produces Beck's, Löwenbräu and 33 Export under licence. Production has gone from 350,000 hectolitres in 1985 to well over 1.7 million today, driven both by domestic demand and by the country's tourism industry. The brewery in the Bab Saadoun district of Tunis has been operating continuously since 1951 but is not open to public visits.
Tunisia is a Muslim-majority country with a comprehensive ban on alcohol advertising, but it is also — uniquely in the region — comfortable with beer at the dinner table. Celtia is what you order with grilled fish in La Goulette, what you sip on the terrace at Sidi Bou Said as the sun sinks into the Gulf of Tunis, what arrives ice-cold and dripping with condensation at the historic Café Saf-Saf in La Marsa. A 5% pale lager doing exactly what a 5% pale lager should do, in exactly the right climate.
🍺 Drinking Beer in Tunisia — Practical Tips
- Celtia is the default beer everywhere — Stella is the slightly cheaper local alternative from the same brewery (SFBT)
- Beer is sold only in licensed venues: hotels, restaurants with an alcohol licence, designated bars and the larger supermarket chains (Carrefour, Monoprix)
- The best informal beer-and-fish experience is in La Goulette or La Marsa — seafront restaurants serving grilled bream and dorade with a cold bottle
- Hotel rooftop bars in Tunis, Hammamet, Sousse and Gammarth are the easiest places to drink in the evening, often with sea or medina views
- Alcohol is not sold during Ramadan in most supermarkets and many restaurants — hotels catering to tourists are the main exception
- Drinking in public spaces (streets, beaches, parks) is not done — keep alcohol to licensed venues and your accommodation
Where to Drink in Tunisia — Bars, Lounges & Historic Cafés
Tunisia does not have a bar scene in the Western sense. Alcohol is served almost exclusively inside licensed restaurants, hotels and a small handful of historic seaside addresses with a permit. These three are the most established places to drink a glass of Tunisian wine, a chilled bottle of Celtia or an afterwork cocktail with the Mediterranean within earshot.
Restaurant Le Golfe
5 Rue Larbi Zarrouk, La Marsa
Originally called Le Cabanon, this is the great beachside institution of La Marsa — ranked #46 on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 and the most natural place in Tunis to drink a bottle of Tunisian red with a plate of grilled fish. The terrace looks straight onto the Mediterranean: bowl of fritto misto to start, grilled octopus or the signature bottarga spaghetti to follow, paired with whatever the cellar is pouring from the Mornag or Kelibia AOC vineyards. Open daily noon to midnight; reservations strongly recommended for dinner and any weekend service.
⏱ Open daily 12:00–00:00 · 🍸 Tunisian wine, Celtia & cocktails · 📍 5 Rue Larbi Zarrouk, La Marsa · Reservation advised
Visit Le Golfe →
Les Dunes
130 Avenue Taieb Mhiri, La Marsa
Tunis's classic three-in-one drinking address, on the hill at Gammarth above La Marsa with the Mediterranean spread out below. The Restaurant serves bistronomic Mediterranean cuisine around a central olive tree; the Lounge is built specifically for an after-work cold Celtia, an apéritif, a glass of Tunisian wine in a low armchair; and the Speakeasy — a hidden 1920s-inspired bar accessed through a secret cupboard door, with stone vaults and a working fireplace — is the most atmospheric cocktail room in greater Tunis. Open daily from noon until midnight.
⏱ Open daily 12:00–00:00 · 🍸 Lounge, restaurant & hidden Speakeasy bar · 📍 130 Av. Taieb Mhiri, La Marsa
Visit Les Dunes →
Café Saf-Saf
Place du Saf-Saf, La Marsa
Not a bar in any modern sense — but the single most evocative place in greater Tunis to sit with a cold Celtia at sunset, with the call to prayer drifting across the courtyard from the mosque next door. Saf-Saf has been here for at least two centuries, built by the Bahri family around an ancient zellige-tiled well where a camel once turned a noria to draw the water. The terrace under the giant poplar tree (the safsaf itself) is the original "popular café" of La Marsa: chess and backgammon players, octogenarian regulars, plates of brik à l'œuf, mint tea, Turkish coffee and — for those who want one — a Celtia from the licensed bar inside. Le Monde once called it "one of the most beautiful cafés in the world".
⏱ Daily 07:00–23:00 · 🎄 Mint tea, Turkish coffee & Celtia · 🍺 Brik à l'œuf, banbalouni · 📍 Place du Saf-Saf, La Marsa
Coffee, Mint Tea & the Tunisian Café
Coffee arrived in Tunisia in the 16th century with the Ottomans. Mint tea came later, in the 18th, through Mediterranean trade. Both became national rituals — but the Tunisian signature is what gets dropped in the glass: a small handful of toasted pine nuts that float on the surface of the tea like ceremony made visible.
Café El Mrabet
Souk El Trouk, Medina of Tunis
Founded at the start of the 17th century by Ali Thabet — an adviser to Youssef Dey, the Ottoman governor of Tunis — El Mrabet is reckoned by the city's own historians to be the oldest café in Tunisia, and one of the oldest in Africa and the Arab world. Originally a meeting place for Ottoman janissary militiamen, it survives today with its broad central banquette and characteristic columns intact — the last witness of a vanished café architecture. Hidden inside the Souk El Trouk in the heart of the medina, with a rooftop terrace looking out over the Zaytuna Mosque, it serves Turkish coffee, mint tea and full Tunisian meals to the patient traveller who manages to find it.
☕ Turkish coffee & mint tea · 🍽️ Couscous, brik, full restaurant · 📍 Souk El Trouk, Medina, Tunis
Visit Café El Mrabet →
Ben Rahim Tunis
Rue de la République, Sidi Bou Said
The first specialty-coffee shop ever to open in Tunisia. Owner Ben Rahim was born in Tunis, learned his craft in Australia, opened his first Berlin café in 2015 and finally brought the concept home to Sidi Bou Said in 2020 — after months of negotiations to make the modern shop fit the protected blue-and-white village. The menu is sugar- and milk-free by philosophy: high-grade ibrik (traditional cezve) coffee, classic pourovers, and rare Yemenia-variety beans from Yemen. Ben Rahim also runs the annual Tunis Coffee Festival each October. For anyone interested in where Tunisian coffee culture is going, this is the address.
☕ Specialty coffee, ibrik & pourover · 🎉 Tunis Coffee Festival each October · 📍 Sidi Bou Said village centre
Visit Ben Rahim →
Café des Nattes (Al Qahwa al Aliya)
Place des Nattes, Sidi Bou Said
At the top of the long climb of Rue Habib Thameur in the cliff-top village of Sidi Bou Said, the green-and-red columns of Café des Nattes — "the High Café" — mark the entrance to a Tunisian institution. Built in 1700 around the zawiya of Sidi Bou Said himself, the café is the last witness in the country to the same Moorish architecture that survives at El Mrabet in Tunis. Visitors leave their shoes at the door and settle on woven mats and carpets. Order the famous thé aux pignons — mint tea with toasted pine nuts floating on the surface — and a shisha. August Macke painted it in 1914; the painters Yahya Turki and Jellal Ben Abdallah were regulars. Almost nothing has changed since.
🍵 Mint tea with pine nuts · 💭 Traditional shisha · 📍 Top of Rue Habib Thameur, Sidi Bou Said
💡 Good to Know
- 🍷 Tunisian wines are best tasted at the estate — very little leaves the country, and the best cuvées are rarely on restaurant lists outside the wine regions
- 🥃 Boukha is traditionally served straight from the freezer in small shot glasses — never with ice, never with mixers (unless you are making a Soviva cocktail)
- 🍺 "Une Celtia, s'il vous plaît" — or simply "Celtia" — is all the French you need to order the national beer anywhere in the country
- 🍵 Thé aux pignons (mint tea with pine nuts) is the higher-status order — it costs more and signals welcome and friendship; offer to pay for the table when invited to it
- ☕ A simple "café" in Tunisia means a strong Turkish-style coffee — ask for "café direct" for an espresso or "café crème" for a milky one
- 😀 Pay attention to time of day in cafés — traditional places like El Mrabet and Café des Nattes are quieter in the morning, fuller and more atmospheric in the late afternoon
- 🎄 "B'saha" (to your health) is the standard Arabic toast — the French "Santé!" also works in every register
- 🌕 Alcohol sales pause across the country during Ramadan in supermarkets and most restaurants; hotel bars catering to tourists are the main exception