Cava to Corpinnat

Credit to Valencia Wine Consulting & Tours:

Cava is the Spanish sparkling wine made in the same way as champagne though the Catalans learned the tricks of champagne production from the French (they used to produce the corks for the champagne bottles), the first Catalan Xampany was made in 1872 by Raventós, still an important producer today.

Some years ago a select group of cava producers left the DO CAVA and now call their sparkling wine “corpinnat” – better than cava that they disliked having compared to ‘cheap champagne’!
We visited the Gramona winery, one of the top cava (sorry, corpinnat!) producers and probably the most well-known and prestigious ones who started cava production in 1881.
Then we headed to one of the oldest wineries of Catalonia: Llopart – also in the corpinnat group. Old documents show they were already producing wine in 1385! Llopart started making cava in 1887 and is one of the most beautiful cava wineries to visit because it overlooks the Montserrat (literally meaning ‘serrated mountain’) mountain range.
Both these producers store in excess of 1.5 million bottles and we learnt interesting things such as how rum used to come back from Latin American countries in the ships to Sitges.

Cava to Corpinnat written by John Thackray – one of the international Thacks Awards panelists, living in Spain. When not traveling and wine-tasting, John is an iGaming specialist reporting into director level in the sports betting industry with a degree in Information Technology.

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