Every October, people come together in a small town in Catalonia to celebrate cava and the culture that has helped establish it as one of the world’s leading wines. For three days, people experience a heady mix of sparkling wine, fine food, and Catalan culture, seeing how small-scale wine production can come to be synonymous with a landscape and people.
Exploring The Home Of Cava
The train to Sant Sadurní d’Anoia takes about an hour from Barcelona. It emerges from the glass arches of Sants train station and weaves its way out of the city, through the suburbs now, and then away from the summer-sea blue of the Mediterranean, tracing its course through the rich green of Catalonian wine country until it reaches its destination, the cava capital of the world.
These fields and vineyards are the historic hubs of nearly all cava production (around 85% of all cava is produced in the Penedès region) with over 80 producers calling the area home. Looking around, it’s clear how fundamental this wine is here, and there in the neatly demarcated lines that coat the hillsides, the intimate, family-run cellars, the grand, historic cava houses. It is interwoven with the town, a vine around a branch, each growing together.
It’s a charming day trip whenever you’re in Barcelona and want to swap the grid system’s hustle and bustle for this feeling of wide, deep-breath open-lungs green space, leaving the city behind for somewhere where everything moves a little more slowly, where time has come to be measured in grape growth and bottles maturing in dark cellars.
But for three days every year, the Cavatast festival takes place and the area bubbles into life, as people come together to toast the wine that has put this town and its vine-patterned hillsides on the map. The event is free to everybody, and they leave the train and are greeted at the station by Catalan folk music twanging out into the air and the starting ceremony, where the mayor gives a speech and pops the cork on a bottle of cava, and everything begins.
Even though the experience of being in this cava paradise is free, some things are worth paying a small amount to be part of. Taking a tour of a wine seller or enjoying a wine and cava pairing is only some of the wonderful things worth spending some extra on. To buy tickets and for more information, visit Cavatast's official website here
The relationship between wine and landscape
You almost definitely know Cava. It is produced using the same method as the more celebrated champagne, also known as the "traditional method" or "méthode champenoise". It involves a second fermentation that takes place in the bottle and creates that effervescent fizz. It is produced in different districts within Catalonia, an autonomous region nestled in the top right of Spain. Cava can be either white or rosé and gains its particular taste from the conditions that make this region so perfect for growing it. What sets it apart is its unique "Denominació d'Origen" (D.O.) protection of origin. Unlike other wine regions, this protection isn't restricted to a specific geographic area. The cava production areas span nearly 65,000 hectares and include regions such as D.O. Rioja, D.O. Navarre, D.O. Aragon, D.O. Utiel-Requena (Valencia), and Catalonia.
The Penedès area enjoys distinctly moderate rainfall - enough to water the soil, never enough to drown it all – with long summer months of bright, Mediterranean sun and gentle winds that keep the heat light and shimmering. These languid, stretching summers are the key to cava, letting the grapes ripen, and ripen, maturing until they develop that distinctive dry taste and heady aroma.
Bringing the finest producers together
Last year, twenty-three of the area’s best producers brought their wines to the festival, bringing their bottles out from the cellars and reintroducing them to the fading summer sun that made them. There are small, family operations, like the historic Muscàndia, run by two brothers whose great-grandfather pioneered the viticultural knowledge that helped establish Sant Sadurní d'Anoia as a centre of wine production. There are organic producers, like Naveran, their vineyard located a 15-minute drive further inland, who champion growing cava with ecologically sound, biodynamic methods.
There are too many more to list here. Seen together, they speak to the interconnectedness and diversity of this wine-producing region, how the historic roots of cava production are still so strong, but also how it has embraced recent trends in the wine industry, safeguarding its landscape and infusing traditional methods with a more modern sensibility.
Growing Cavatast Festival
Last year was the event’s twenty-sixth, the first after a pandemic-enforced two-year hiatus. Throughout its quarter century, the event had taken place along the narrow street of the Carrer Reval that meanders through the town, but this time the organisers relocated to the Parc Lluís Companys, an airy, open space that looks out to where the town fades into the fields and the fields grow into the green foothills of the Pyrenees.
The change of home has helped the event grow into a true celebration of the area. The heart of it all is still the tasting pavilions, people being introduced to seemingly endlessly diverse samples under the guidance of the people who produced them, but now there is so much more. Tours guide people around the town, exhibitions celebrate its past and its art.
The festival brings together some of the world's best Cava producers, amazing local food and wine lovers, making it a spectacular event with chef-led food pairings of oysters and cava, tapas and cava, everything and cava. People congregate for talks about cava production in the church-like El Cellar de la Fassina de Can Guineu, a historic space of old stone and wooden beams that arch over the cava-sipping faces below, while above ground, Catalan folk music mingles with the steady breeze as the crowds meander through it all. It is drinking at its most educational and most devotional, dedicated to singing the praises of the area’s finest export.
A Celebration of Local Culture
Last year’s festival marked 150 years since the first bottle of cava was produced, and in the intervening century and a half, this singular sparkling wine has put down its roots in the area, both establishing itself as a darling of the global wine world and becoming fundamental to how people live in this part of Catalonia.
The grapes that are grown here and the drink that is made from those grapes are crucial to the town’s economy, but if you get the chance to visit here, you see it is more than that. Generation after generation of producers has tended the same fields, enjoying the same Mediterranean sun, washed over by that steady wind and the distinctly moderate rain it brings. More than anything, the festival is a celebration of how local, small-scale wine production and this process of a community and tradition and heritage can become so interwoven with identity, of how this wine and this town have developed and aged together through these yearly cycles of growing, harvesting, and drinking.
Cavatast Festival information
The 27th edition of the Cavatast Fair will be an unmissable event. Even though visiting the village and taking part in some of the activities are free, some are worth paying extra for, such as spectacular tasting activities, live music, visits to the cellars and special evenings such as the Night of Magnums, great Cavas and Gastronomy, among others.
SCHEDULE
Friday, September 29, IV Night of Magnums, great Cavas and Gastronomy, from 8 p.m.
Friday, October 6, from 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Saturday, October 7, from 12 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Sunday, October 8, from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m.
TICKETS
Cava and gastronomy tasting (6 tickets): € 10.00
Purchase of tasting glass (Riedel): € 5.00
Rental of tasting glass (Riedel): € 3.00 To buy tickets and for more information, visit Cavatast's official website here
