After enduring eight hours on a flight bound for Barcelona - including a coach seat, some very dubious looking “chicken” and other culinary atrocities - I confide to my seat-mate Anil that I cannot wait to get to Spain.
“No, you are not in Spain. You are in Catalonia,” she tells me quite seriously. In Barcelona, I quickly notice the signs are in Catalan, a distinct language that’s similar to a mash-up of Spanish and French. The Spanish Americans grow up learning in school what is called Castilian or Castellano in Spanish.
You could easily spend a week studying the Catalan culture by visiting fanciful Gaudi architecture found at Parque Güell, the Gothic section, the Picasso Museum or just strolling along the Ramblas, people-watching while carefully clutching your purse.
But whenever I visit a new land, I prefer to get to know the place and its people as part of a sensory journey through wine and food. And Catalans will find no fault with this method.
They’re hard-working and they love to have a good time too, dining into the morning at tapas restaurants like Tapaç 24 (269 Diputacio, Barcelona) and Inopia (104 Carrer Tamarit, Barcelona) and cocktail bars like the legendary Dry Martini (162-166 Aribau, Barcelona,) or the swank new Bankers Bar in the Hotel Mandarin Oriental (38-40 Paseig de Gracia, Barcelona) with its ceiling done in steel safe deposit boxes.
But the simplest way to experience a taste of Catalonia is with a sip of cava, the sparkling wine that’s been made in this region since the mid 1800s.
Cava is made with the same method as champagne using local grapes including xarel-lo, parellada, macabeo and sometimes chardonnay or pinot noir. Whether dry or sweet, rose or pale gold, these wines all have a fresh and lively character.
Consider taking a short 45 minute drive out to the heart of cava country to visit Sant Sadurni d’Anoia. More than 100 wineries that make sparkling and other wines are located in this quaint town of 11,000 residents.
“People drink wine every day. Here we drink cava every day,” says Xavier Roig, whose family owns Cal Feru (51 Calle de la Diputaçio, Sant Sadurni d’Anoia), a wine shop specializing in cava since 1923. “This is the town of the bubbles.”
Pere Ventura offers a very modern, French-inspired winery and tasting room while a visit to Freixenet, the largest sparkling wine company in the world, delivers a wine theme park complete with its own trams and robots that carefully stack the bottles in the caves.
Every restaurant in the area offers cava, often a light, clean wine by Segura Viudas or Juve y Camps that’s a perfect foil for Catalan fare like pan con tomate (pa amb tomaquet), amazingly fresh seafood like delicate sweet shrimp served with the head on or chipirones, small squid sauteed in garlic, olive oil and their own ink as served famously at El Quim in the Boqueria (91 Rambles, Barcelona) food market.
There are more complex long-aged cavas, carefully crafted and aged for years to a toasty richness that makes them taste very similar to grand marque champagne. With names like Raventos i Blanc, Gramona and Recaredo, these cavas show up at the top tables including Gary Danko in San Francisco, Per Se in New York City, El Bulli in Roses, Spain and Catalan favorite Cal Xim in Sant Pau and Barcelona.
If you make the trip, stay in nearby Vilafranca del Penedès, where there’s a very modern and comfortable hotel called Casa Torner i Güell; it will remind you of a roomier version of the Mercer Hotel in Soho. The hotel restaurant is presided over by a young chef named Xavi d’Amor who uses seasonal and local ingredients like a black rooster, scallops, pork and maybe artichokes to create tasting menus paired with four different styles of cava.
The signature dessert of the region is Crema Catalan; a baked custard flavored with vanilla and orange. But d’Amor is more likely to serve something with chocolate and spiked with a bit of salt and olive oil. And another glass of cava.
