Champagne Taste on a Cava Wage

Sure, champagne gets all the fun quotes and glitzy cameos but have you heard of its much more approachable and affordable Spanish counterpart Cava?

It is likely you have! Cava has been having a She’s All That, Laney Boggs took off her glasses-esque moment for a few years now. Winemakers placing greater emphasis on quality over quantity has resulted in high quality wines with rich nutty brioche notes, subtle fruity flavors of apple and peach and a minerality.

Cava, named after the stone cellars where it is aged, is made in Catalonia in north east Spain, the vast majority coming from the area of Penedès near Barcelona, with small amounts coming from the Rioja and Valencia regions. There are three indigenous grape varieties generally used in cava: Macabeu, with a light lemon flavor and soft floral aroma; Xarel·lo, with fruity notes, stronger, richer aromatics and greater aging potential and Parellada, with zesty flavor and sharp acidity. Macabeu is usually the majority grape in cava blends, but high quality bottles are often predominantly Xarel·lo.

It was first produced in 1872 by Josep Raventós. He brought the méthode champenoise with him from France, where Champagne vineyards were stricken by a plague of phylloxera lice, creating a demand for sparkling wine. The Méthode Champenoise (Champagne method) is a sparkling wine making technique in which still wine is bottled, and topped up with a combination of wine, yeast and sugar known as liqueur de tirage, which kick-starts a second fermentation. The carbon dioxide created during this fermentation is trapped in the bottle, dissolving into the wine, and becoming voila, bubbles!

The bottles of newly sparkling wine are then cellared for a minimum of nine months. They are stored slanted down, the angle becoming steeper as they are turned regularly (riddled) so the dead yeasts from the liqueur de tirage can settle in the neck of the bottle. The more traditional cava houses still riddle them by hand, but the potential for exploding bottles means that many are riddled by machine.

This sediment in the neck – called the lees – scents and flavors the wine; the longer it rests on the lees, the more complex it has the potential to become. Ultimately the wine will be filtered off of the lees and packaged into a fresh, new bottle. By European law this is how all cavas and champagnes are made; prosecco and other sparkling wines employ different, less laborious methods.

You might ask if cava and champagne are made in exactly the same method, why does a bottle of champagne cost so much more? A couple of factors determine the price difference - Operational cost are much lower in Spain and the Catalonian growing season is very consistent therefore the grapes reliably ripen. In France however there are often frosts and hailstorms that damage vineyards and drive wine grape prices up. And frankly cava just doesn’t have the social capital that champagne does. When champagne tells our wallets to jump, we ask ‘how high?’.

All the better for us, I say! Cava is an excellent, affordable match for both celebration and food. Its bone dry acidity and bubbles means it cuts through the fattiness of fried food, oily fish (Did somebody say boquerones!?) and cheese. This acidity also means it is not completely overwhelmed by other acids such as vinegar and tomatoes, both of which are usually difficult to pair with wine.

Luckily The Twin Cities are awash in a sea of cava; my favorite go-tos are Torre Oria, Avinyó and Pere Mata, available at many stores in town.