Travel + Leisure - India & South Asia
Spain’s signature sparkling wine.
Catalonia’s gastronomic prowess is well known to travellers, who flock to Barcelona for its tapas bars and temples of modernist cuisine. So why is nearby Penedès, the birthplace of Spain’s sparkling wine, still a secret? A long weekend reveals a region re
CAVA, SPAIN’S SIGNATURE sparkling wine, originated roughly 150 years ago in the quietly prosperous Catalan town of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia. If you visit today, you can see its impact everywhere. There’s the sleek CIC Fassina Cava Interpretation Center, housed in a 19th-century distillery that once transformed the effervescent wine into brandy. Giant barrels and other wine-inspired objects sit in roundabouts and town squares; bottleshaped bollards on the sidewalks protect pedestrians. On the outskirts of Sant Sadurní, large bodegas run by mainstream producers, including Freixenet and Recaredo, loom over the landscape. At harvest time, slow-moving tractors churn along the narrow roads, the shoulders of which bear stains from dripping juice.
Sant Sadurní lies at the heart of cava country, in Penedès, a sprawling region that runs from the sea to the mountains, about a 30-minute drive southwest of Barcelona. Millions of years ago, the valley was covered by what is now the Mediterranean. When the water retreated, it left behind untold numbers of fossilised sea creatures whose carbonised remains riddle the soil, helping give cava its characteristic tang. Like many travellers, I had enjoyed a cava or two in one of Barcelona’s cosy champanerías, as well as at my own dinner table, without ever really associating it with any particular terroir. So when my family and I were invited by Pepe Raventós, scion of the most famous family in cava, to visit his winery, Raventós i Blanc, we decided to use it as a jumping-off point to explore this largely overlooked region.
On the Weekend, I rolled into Sant Sadurní with my wife and 10-year-old daughter; summer was giving way to autumn and the town was celebrating. Residents packed the streets for Festa de la Fiŀloxera, a raucous annual gathering that commemorates the eradication of the yellow-hued louse, which in the late
19th century decimated the wine industry, not only here but across much of Europe. Along with thousands of others, we watched townspeople parade in outlandish yellow louse costumes. Joan Amat, the town’s former mayor, pointed out statues honouring seven local men who had helped defeat the pestilence. One of them depicted Josep Raventós Fatjó, Pepe’s ancestor and the creator, in 1872, of cava itself.
Penedès is dominated by the jagged Montserrat mountains, the site of Royal Monastery of Santa
María de Guadalupe, Catalonia’s most sacred retreat. The landscape is a mix of grapevines clinging to hillsides, wine-production facilities, and elegant early-20th-century Modernista buildings built by wine fortunes. In Vilafranca del Penedès, a 20-minute drive from Sant Sadurní, you’ll find the Vinseum, housed in a 13th-century building that was once the seat of the Catalan-Aragon kingdom. It gives a fascinating spin through viticultural history, with a tasting at the end. (I tried a Cygnus Brut from 1+1=3, which had a mineral and citrus tang that offset the afternoon heat.) Outside town is the striking Hotel Mastinell, which was built to mimic a rack of cava bottles. Not far away, at Hotel Castell de Gimenelles, an old masia, or farmhouse, turned rustic inn, Jordi Urpí, the co-owner, eagerly showed me the stone bathroom of one guest room. Centuries ago, he explained, it was a cistern for storing wine.
At Raventós i Blanc, Pepe pried the lid off a massive steel tank and gestured for me to scale its ladder for a look. Inside was a first fermentation, topped by brumera marrona, a brown foam that was fizzing and churning. The murky, unfiltered liquid below the froth would later be clarified, bottled, and stored in the caves below for secondary fermentation and ageing. In two years, this would become one of the company’s premium wines, Textures de Pedra. Nearby, Pepe had buried a few amphorae, allowing the ambient heat of the earth to provide the proper temperature for fermentation. “It makes me wonder why we need a winery,” he said.
Raventós i Blanc is not open to visitors, but Penedès is filled with all sorts of agroturisme opportunities. One could stay 10 minutes outside Sant Sadurní at Mas Palou, a simple but elegant masia complete with a pool and working vineyard, which sells grapes to Raventós. Maria Vallès Beneit, who grew up in the house and now helps run the inn, pointed out a curious bench in the yard around which a tree had grown. “The family hid jewellery in the ground there during the Spanish Civil War,” she told us.
With some 200 cava producers in the region, visitors are spoilt for choice. Pepe’s open-to-thepublic favourites include Can Ràfols dels Caus and Pardas. He also raves about Enric Soler and natural winemaker Toní Carbó. And just across the road from Raventós i Blanc sits Cavas Codorníu, an older winery owned by Pepe’s relatives. The site is worth visiting for its design alone—namely, the soaring, vaulted winery building and fairy-tale structure designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, an often overshadowed contemporary of Antoni Gaudí. Visitors ride a tram through some 30 kilometres of arched caves, all lined with millions of bottles of wine.
My family also stopped by Sant Sadurní’s Chocolates Simón Coll, which has been making confections since 1840—before even cava. In the factory, CEO Maria Coll told me that she had left Penedès for a time but returned to become the first woman to run her family’s business.
One of the best places to drink cava is Cal Xim, a restaurant Pepe virtually demanded we visit. Located on a quiet square in Sant Pau d’Ordal, it’s a favourite haunt of local vignerons. The meal was a full-on Catalan Sunday lunch: roast duck with raisins and pine nuts; pa amb tomáquet, the ubiquitous, and delicious, bread with tomato; and escalivada, a plate of vegetables, grilled over oak. Just across the square, we stopped for an espresso and a game of foosball at the cafe of the Centre Agrícola, a Wes Andersonesque cultural centre.
A virtue of this disparate region is that you can be at the seaside for lunch but easily back in the country for cocktail hour. One day we headed to the city of Vilanova i la Geltrú for a meal at Xiringuito Miramar, a busy seafood restaurant that Pepe ranks among his favourites. We then zipped down the coast to Sant Salvador to tour the former summer house of the renowned cellist and composer Pablo Casals. Just outside, my daughter decided to plunge into the ocean, still warm in September. We were back at the winery in time for what became a treasured ritual during our trip: enjoying a glass of cava and tapas by the pool as we watched the harvest workers finishing up in the vineyards below, the sacred peaks of Montserrat hovering hazily in the distance. Terroir, sweet terroir.