The curse of cheap and cheerful

Spanish makers of quality Cava are struggling to reinvent the wine's bargain-sparkler image. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Bubbles of love: clockwise from top left, horse ploughing at Recaredo; sorting grapes at Gramona; vineyards at Gramona; hand-disgorging bottles at Mestres

At last week’s brilliant Viñateros Spanish tasting in London, eight producers were showing sparkling wines. All were from Penedès, the region just south of Barcelona where 95 per cent of Cava is made – but only one labelled their wines as such. This situation reflects two decades of infighting in the Cava controlling body, its Denominación de Origen (DO) – and says a lot about the wine itself, too.

Cava is odd for start because unlike every other DO in Spain except sherry, its DO isn’t based on a particular region. It designates merely the method of making sparkling wine – ie the same one as in Champagne, rather than the cheaper and quicker charmat technique used to make Prosecco. (Producers adopted the “Cava” designation in 1970, when it was clear that the French weren’t going to tolerate them referring to it as Champán or Catalan Xampany any more.)

So Cava can be made in more than 20 other Spanish regions too: indeed I confess that my go-to Cava is Muga’s Conde de Haro, made in Rioja. It doesn’t even have to be made from the same grapes as in in the Catalan heartland, Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel·lo – in fact Xarel·lo is grown almost nowhere outside Catalunya. This has long annoyed producers in Penedès, based around the small town of Sant Sadurni d’Anoia, a short commuter-train ride out of Barcelona.

What, however, has angered small producers more than anything is the grip on Cava, and on its international image, of two giant producers, Freixenet and Codorníu. That image is best illustrated by the reaction of my mother-in-law once in a London Spanish restaurant when I ordered a nice bottle of Cava from organic pioneers Albet i Noya that cost over £20. She was outraged that I was wasting money on a type of sparkling wine that was, then, a fiver in the supermarket. 

It was understandable. Freixenet and Codorníu led Cava’s export push around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. They sold oceans of the stuff, cheap – some as supermarket own brands, others under their own labels. But in the process they tarnished Cava’s image for a generation.

The Henkell Freixenet group, the world's biggest sparkling wine producer by volume, sold more than 110 million bottles of Cava in 2022, making an annual turnover of well over €1 billion. It accounts for about half of total cava production. Also, its wines are utterly forgettable cheap fizz: even its fancier cuvées are uninspiring.  

Codorníu makes roughly another quarter of the total. In 2022 it exported around five million bottles to the UK alone (for comparison, that’s more than half of England’s total annual production of sparkling wine.) Its big-volume cuvées are alright, if pretty dull.

It is no surprise, then, that the big boys have also long more or less controlled the DO – and that more quality-focussed producers eventually rebelled. In 2004, small bodega Colet left DO Cava.

“It was very scary,” Irene Mestre, wife of Sergi Colet, told me last week. “We needed to wait 20 years to prove it was not such a bad idea.” In fact, she says Colet’s sales haven’t suffered at all from no longer being part of the Cava brand.

What is more, since 2013, their wines have been part of a new sub-DO of Penedès – Clàssic Penedès, a development campaigned for by Colet along with Albet i Noya. Its rules are much stricter than those of Cava: all the grapes must be organically grown and the wines must spend 15 months on their lees (a key part of the champagne production process.)

Meantime, there had been another breakaway from the DO, in 2012, by Raventós i Blanc. They have since labelled their sparkling wines “Conca del Riu Anoia” – essentially a small sub-zone of Penedès. And then, in 2019 but after several years of preparation, six bodegas walked out of the DO to form the Corpinnat designation.

Led by top producers including Gramona, Recaredo and Sabaté i Coca, Corpinnat’s rules are even stricter than those of Clàssic Penedès: grapes have to be hand-harvested as well as organic, and pressed at the bodega, with longer ageing rules too.

At present, Corpinnat remains a registered brand but not a DO as such. It now has 11 members; they have had talks with Clàssic Penedès over establishing a joint designation, though those haven’t got anywhere. But as Marcel Sabaté told me last week, “it will never be a DO – the others would never accept it”: to establish a completely new DO requires the agreement of other DOs, and the big Cava players are not about to swallow that.

The Cava DO has made some efforts to up its game. Since 2021, wines labelled Reserva need longer ageing, and there is more scope to label wines as coming from particular zones. Some serious producers have stayed loyal to the Cava designation, notably Juvé & Camps. Wines from venerable bodega Mestres are still thus labelled too: Export Director David Aura Font, whose family have owned the bodega for centuries, told me that Cava has sentimental value because they were the first to adopt the term, in the 1950s.

But does any of it really matter for British drinkers? The reality is that the vast majority of Cava’s output remains locked in a race to the bottom with Prosecco. The Italian rival is such a serious threat (the UK imports around 120 million bottles a year) that in 2017 Freixenet even launched its own branded Prosecco. It’s pretty grim although the bottle is quite instagrammable: Freixenet are no doubt right, commercially, to concentrate on packaging rather than agonising about sub-zonal labelling.

Sadly, for the large majority of even knowledgeable British wine consumers, Cava remains a cheap and cheerful sparkler. Wine shops and restaurants are only ever likely to sell the deliciousness that is Gramona III Lustros Brut Nature 2015, or Colet Vatua! Rosé Extra Brut 2019, or Mestres Clos Nostre Senyor 2015 via the recommendation of a knowledgeable salesperson or sommelier.

The fact that the first is labelled Corpinnat, the second Clàssic Penedès and the third Cava is neither here nor there to anyone except wine nerds like me – or hopefully to my readers, now you’ve got through this piece. But these are as serious as any high-end sparkling wines, and I do highly recommend them (though perhaps not yet to my mother-in-law.)

Celebration: a glass of Sabaté i Coca Castellroig Reserva Brut Nature 2019, Corpinnat - more importantly, with your name on it

What I’ve been drinking this week

Domaine Belle “Les Terres Blanches” 2020, Crozes-Hermitage – most people think of northern Rhône classic Crozes-Hermitage as a red but just over ten per cent of production is in fact white. This is a nice one, made pretty typically from majority Marsanne with the balance Roussanne. Lovely depth and some length, though I felt it could do with a touch more acidity (now N/A UK; Vinatis have the 2022, £26.02.)

Joël Remy “Les Beaumonts” 2020, Chorey-les-Beaune – it’s a mark of how silly Burgundy prices have become that a village wine from modest appellation like Chorey-les-Beaune is nearly £30. But this red, from a warm vintage, is nevertheless the real thing: bright fruit with a fair bit of heft but well balanced (Lea and Sandeman, £29.50.)

Giuseppe Cortese Barbaresco 2019 – classic Nebbiolo fragrance, delicate berry fruit and a hard mineral core. A bit too hard right now, in fact - this needs time: the bottle that a friend brought last Saturday night was better on Sunday lunchtime, but it really needs another two to three years in the cellar (Taurus Wines, Woodwinters Wines, from £34.99 and at Farr Vintners and elsewhere in bond.)