In the 1860's a Spanish gentleman named Josep Raventos ambitiously traveled around Europe and was making his way back through France. He was the head of his family winery named Codorniu and he was looking to sell his wines. France was going through some tough times with its wine and needed to find other sources to fill their cups. Phylloxera, a louse that has an appetite for the roots of the vitis vinifera grapevine, had just begun to strike and nobody knew what it was and how to cure it.
(This article was written for GrapeBunch, our weekly wine periodical. Click here to read the original!)
(This article was written for GrapeBunch, our weekly wine periodical. Click here to read the original!)
Champagne, not yet a victim of phylloxera, was one of his stops and what he saw and tasted made him think of the possibility of recreating it back home. Sure, sparkling wine was being made in Spain but not in this way and not of this quality. After his tour of France he returned to San Sadurni de Noya, a town located in the Penedès region of Catalonia. In 1872, using borrowed champagne winemaking equipment, he released his first methode champenoise sparkling wine and it was a success.
Raventos named it Champán. He gathered fellow friendly winemakers and they began to shape the category together, meeting every Sunday night to discuss and share ideas. A hundred years later it became clear that a different name was needed for this specialty wine if they were going to differentiate themselves from champagne. It would be called Cava, Spanish for cave and cellar.
Phylloxera wouldn't hit Champagne until 1890 but it found its way to Penedès in 1887. Many grape varieties that couldn't handle it, especially reds, were simply uprooted and replaced by native ones that could, especially whites. The Raventos family chose three of those hardier white grape varieties for the future generations of their sparkler, and from that day forth they would be the varieties that make Spanish Cava: Macabeo, Xarel-lo and Parellada.
Macabeo's primary purpose is that it's late budding so it will do just fine against a spring frost, unlike Xarel-lo and Parellada. It's nuetral in flavor so it projects the flavors from the traditional method well and normally takes up about half of the blend. Most of the other flavor characteristics of Cava, and what really separates it from its counterpart in Champagne, come from the vocal aromatics and earthy flavors of the Xerel-lo grape. Parrelada is acidic and crispy, which are both pretty important for sparkling wine. Chardonnay is also being used now as well as the red grapes Garnacha, Monastrell, Pinot Noir and Trepat.
After Josep's death, his son Miguel would take over operations, although I cannot find an exact year (or a broader timespan) of when this happened. In 1889 Freixenet's Pedro Ferrer dug what was going on at Codorniu so he started making his own Cava using the same method and grapes. The category started to spread from Penedès to the rest of Catalonia, and to other places in Spain. Cava was an immediate hit!
Cava now has its own version of the traditional method, with different laws about harvest yields and lees aging and etc. For the longest time Cava didn't even have a region that it was confined to until the European Union wanted one in the 1990's. Almost all Cava (90%) is made in Catalonia and an overwhelming majority of that is from Penedès, with tiny pockets of other permitted regions scattered elsewhere in Spain. The town of San Sadurni de Noya is still the heartbeat of Cava.
SEGURA VIUDAS BRUT CAVA
Segura Viudas Brut Cava has a nice breadiness with notes of white fruits, citrus, and tropical fruit. Pairing: Porcini mushroom risotto.
This article was written for The GrapeBunch Wine Periodical.
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Joey Casco
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