Cava Academy

Late last year, I enrolled with Cava Academy for a qualification specifically designed for WSET Certified Educators. The aim is to educate us so we can educate students who will then spread the word through restaurants, shops, and to friends and family.

For all regions, education is vital to foster an understanding and appreciation of the wines and why they taste like they do. This is especially important for Cava, which has a reputation for basic, inexpensive sparkling wines. The regional body is working hard to change that reputation, introducing regulations which encourage quality, sustainability, and a greater sense of place in the wines. But these changes mean little if trade and consumer alike don’t understand them.

The course was a series of promotional presentations about Cava: its history, the regions, the grape varieties, the ageing regulations, and food pairings, with a quiz at the end of each section. There are also videos presented by Pedro Ballesteros MW about different specific wines. To help us appreciate the wines even more, I was sent six bottles of Cava.

Also part of the course was a two-day trip to Penedès in Catalunya, where 95% of Cava is made. Living in California, I was initially reluctant to make the long trip to Spain just for two days, but it was completely worth it. After all, to understand the wines of a region you have to go there (and afterwards I visited Galicia and Portugal).

blind tasting of twelve wines

The two days began with an introduction to Cava, the regions, and the revised regulations designed to promote quality, followed by a blind tasting of twelve wines. This served as a fun ice-breaker (bubbles!) and as an insight into the various styles of Cava, tasting wines aged for nine months all the way to 14 years, from the main Cava grape varieties (Xarel·lo, Macabeu, and Parellada), Garnatxa, and Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. There were also a couple of wines from Levante, where the climate is warmer than Catalunya, but generally from higher elevation. I was quite surprised that Chardonnay is planted so much in this zone of Cava, less so by the ripe richness of the wines. (Levante producers tasted: Choazas Carrascol and Hispano Suizas.)

Over the course of the rest of the trip, we visited several wineries, each visit with a different focused theme.

vins el cep: paraje calificado

Announced in 2016, Cava de Paraje Calificado is a new single-vineyard designation created to make place integral to an understanding of quality Cava. There are currently just ten vineyards which have been awarded the classification, with a couple more in the works.

One of the producers with a Paraje is Vins el Cep, formed in the 1980s by four families who were determined to maintain the quality of Cava when the general trend was for volume.

90-year-old Macabeu vines

The vines for the Paraje are ninety years old, farmed biodynamically, with yields of 50hl/ha. That’s below the maximum 80hl/ha for Paraje (100hl/ha for Guarda Superior and 120hl/ha for Cava de Guarda): this is an old-vine site which gives a true sense of place. We tried two vintages, from 2014 and 2015, , both of them aged for seven years, and a blend of 40% Xarel·lo, 30% Macabeu, and 30% Parellada: both wines were sophisticated, powerful, and simultaneously subtle.

We also tasted other Paraje wines: they have a power and weight, while maintaining remarkable freshness despite long ageing. They’re quite different from other regions’ sparkling wines; in part, that’s because the moderate Mediterranean climate is quite different from other sparkling wine regions. That’s clear in any well-made Cava, but a Paraje wine is even more individual and vinous—not just sparkling wine, but wine.

vilarnau: blending exercise

Our visit to Vilarnau was perhaps the most fun part of the two days, as it involved a very informative blending exercise. We split into four groups and were given six wines to taste, two each from Macabeu, two each from Xarel·lo, and two each from Parellada. Our task was to create a base wine for a Cava Guarda de Superior Reserva (which requires 18 months ageing).

Vilarnau winemaker Eva Plazas

We were given technical details on each wine: alcohol, pH, titrate acidity, and volume of production. Assessing these wines wasn’t just about taste but also about context. The base wine for Cava has to be minimum 9.5% ABV and maximum 11.5% (the second fermentation adds 1.5% ABV), so we needed to take the levels of alcohol into account for each wine. We had to create a wine for 50,000 bottle production, a commercial consideration we needed to think about. Furthermore, we were creating a wine that would have a second fermentation and 18 months lees ageing. We were creating a specific style of wine, not one that we simply liked.

Blending the wines was also a reminder that a grape variety doesn’t just produce one wine; each wine from the varieties had different structural elements and flavour profile. So when you read the blend a wine is composed of, remember each variety is often a blend of site, climate, and soil for a stylistic consistency of flavour, acidity, and alcohol.

Taking all these factors into consideration as we tasted and blended, we created a base wine which had the weight of Xarel·lo, the fresh aromatics of Macabeu, and the high acid, low alcohol of Parellada. And my team’s wine was voted the best blend!

mestres: disgorgement & dosage

Mestres is a winery founded in 1861, focusing exclusively on sparkling wine in 1925. In 1945, they released their first non-dosage, and now all the wines bar one are Brut Nature. This completely dry style is increasingly common for Cava as the warmer climate means that adding sugar isn’t necessary to balance the searing acidity found in Champagne (although commercial wines may have up to 9g/L of sugar for a touch of sweetness).

Mestres are also unusual for any sparkling wine producer, as they age the bottles under cork rather than screwcap, allowing small, gradual oxygen exposure for a more open, less reductive style. Cork taint is consequently a concern, but each bottle is tested on disgorgement.

The bottles are constantly rotated around the large underground cellars, as a form of bâtonnage. Every bottle is hand-disgorged without any freezing (which we got to witness; I have to say it doesn’t seem the most time efficient method but no wine was lost). The cork ageing also means the pressure in the bottle is lessened, with wines at 3.5 degrees which is the lowest Cava can legally be. Disgorgement is considered to be the last production process before the wine is released, but Mestres is experimenting with ageing after disgorgement, releasing the 2002 vintage after different levels of post-disgorgement ageing.

Another point worthy of note: oak. Ageing in barrels isn’t talked about that much for sparkling wine, as it’s very rarely new or noticeable in the final wine. “Mas Via,” from 2006, spends one year in old oak and then 16 years in the bottle: there are many Cava wines aged for an extraordinarily long time. Vilarnau also have a Xarel·lo Gran Reserva, partially aged in chestnut barrels, and “Torre Galimany” from Segura Viudas is a Xarel·lo based wine that has some barrel fermentation. Xarel·lo is a reductive variety which benefits from some exposure to oxygen; barrel ageing adds a soft roundness to the wines; and there’s a nutty, oxidative character which complements the characteristics of the the grape varieties, particuarly Xarel·lo.

segura viudas: food pairing

Go to any wine region, and the producers will tell you how food friendly the wines are. Cava’s no different, and the D.O. went out of their way to demonstrate the gastronomic versatility of the wines. We finished our winery visits at Segura Viudas, which is owned by Freixenet-Henkell but operates independently. Having toured the facilities, we had lunch in the 13th-century castle; and by lunch I mean a five-course meal with five Segura Viudas wines. The carefully organised pairings demonstrated that Cava can pair with many foods: gazpacho and basil ice cream; asparagus; monkfish; duck; and, of course, cheese. It was a sumptuous experience.

I’ve written on this site before and spoken on my podcast about how Cava is pushing towards quality. For instance, Cava de Guarda Superior wines must be farmed organically. It will still take some time for a consistently high quality to become standard, and for consumers to appreciate the wines. But the wines are on the right path: visiting the best wineries proves that.