Penedès

I drove into the Penedès from Barcelona on a September morning, heading south on the AP-7 until the motorway gave way to secondary roads lined with vineyards. The harvest was underway — I passed a tractor carrying a load of white Xarel·lo grapes that smelled sharp and yeasty as I sat behind it at a junction, that specific perfume of fermenting fruit that signals the season is changing and something good is beginning. The Penedès in September has a particular golden quality: the vines turning color, the light flatter and more amber than in summer, the villages quiet in the middle of the day because everyone who isn’t harvesting is sleeping through the heat.

Sant Sadurní d’Anoia is the capital of cava production, a town so devoted to its sparkling wine that the local infrastructure exists largely to service the bodegas. The big producers — Codorníu, Freixenet — offer tours that descend into underground cellars stretching for kilometers, ranks of bottles stacked in the darkness in their riddling frames, being turned a quarter rotation by machines that have replaced the riddlers who once did it by hand. I went to Codorníu on a tour led by a woman in her fifties who had been doing it for eleven years and still seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the méthode traditionnelle. The caves are magnificent — cathedral-vaulted, cool as a church in August, smelling of stone and slow fermentation. You come out blinking into the Catalan sun and they hand you a glass of Brut Reserva and it tastes, somehow, of all of that darkness and patience.

The smaller bodegas are where things get interesting. Gramona, Recaredo, Can Feixes — these are family operations making cava from single estates with the same seriousness that Champagne applies to its grower producers. I spent an afternoon at a small estate outside Torrelavit where the owner, a compact man in his sixties named Jordi, walked me through his vineyards explaining why he had pulled up the Parellada and replaced it with Xarel·lo. He poured wine straight from a tank that wasn’t finished yet — it tasted of green apples and something almost savory underneath — and said that cava’s reputation for cheapness was entirely the fault of the volume producers, not the grape variety. He was not wrong, and I bought two cases and then had to rethink my packing.

Vilafranca del Penedès, the regional capital, has a Modernista market building and the Museu de les Cultures del Vi — one of the better wine museums in Spain, occupying a medieval palace and tracing viticulture from the Roman period through to the contemporary natural wine movement. The town also hosts the Festa Major every August, when the castellers — the human tower builders — perform in the main square. I watched a colla attempt a 9 de 8 in the late afternoon heat, the top two levels of the tower occupied by children no older than eight, their hands clasped above their heads for balance, the crowd below holding its breath with complete collective seriousness. The tower went up, held for a count I could feel rather than hear, and then came apart from the top down in a controlled descent that brought the crowd back to noise all at once.

When to go: September is the harvest month and the bodegas are at their most alive, the air itself smelling of fermentation. April and May bring the vines into leaf and the countryside into green. The smaller estates are best visited by appointment, so plan ahead if you want access to the serious producers.