An Eating and Drinking Guide to Spain’s Penedès Region, the Birthplace of Cava

Around 25 miles to the west of Barcelona lies the rolling hills of Penedès, one of Spain’s oldest wine regions and the land of Cava. These crisp sparklers have a pedigree that goes back generations.

Throughout its 2,700-year wine-producing history, Penedès—which includes the counties of Alt Penedès, Penedès and Garraf—was traversed by the ancient peoples and empires whose influences came to form the basis of Western Civilization as we now know it, and for whom wine was integral to cultural exchange. Because of this, it’s a must-visit destination for wine lovers.

A Long History of Winemaking

“Wine was brought to us by the classical cultures,” says Xavier Fornos, a historian from Vilafranca del Penedès, one of the region’s major cities. Fornos is the director of Vinseum, a museum in Vilafranca dedicated to preserving and disseminating Catalan wine heritage. 

Early cities like Ampurias were contact points between the indigenous Iberian tribes and the Phoenician and later Greek colonizers in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., where the Greeks may have shared winemaking traditions with Iberian society. The drink was likely used for ceremonial purposes, Fornos says, possibly to celebrate deals between Greek and Phoenician leaders and Iberian chiefs.

During the Roman period, the port of Tarraco, now the nearby city of Tarragona, saw the mass commercialization of winemaking and the spread of Catalan wine throughout the empire. Pliny the Elder, one of the first wine critics, wrote that wine from Tarraco was Rome’s best.

By the late 1800s, Catalan producers were bringing French Champagne-making techniques to Catalonia. Modern Penedès is best known for sparkling wine and the white grape varieties Xarel-lo, Macabeu and Parellada, traditionally used in Cava. 

Though the industry now favors white varieties, the area is also home to fragrant reds, like Garnacha, Monastrell, Carinyena and Sumoll, which were grown widely before the 19th-century phylloxera plague and have recently seen renewed interest.  

A Cuisine of the Mountains and the Sea

While wine is one of the region’s draws, its food is alluring as well. “You could say that it’s a traditional cuisine of the mountains and the sea, very much linked to the garden,” says local sommelier and journalist Ramon Francas i Martorell.

Fresh garden vegetables are crucial to local gastronomy, as is seafood, and a gamut of traditional sauces. A fragrant dressing of blended almonds, breadcrumbs, vinegar, garlic, red ñora pepper and extra virgin olive oil called Xató is typical, served over an anchovy, cod and endive salad.

The large, lean Penedesenca chickens eat grape seeds and are famous for their tender meat and dark brown eggs. Also notable is the Catalan tradition of calçotada, a festive barbecue where people eat enormous amounts of grilled calçot, a type of green onion native to Catalonia. They’re charred over an open flame until the outer leaves are blackened and the inner flesh is caramelized, and dipped in a romesco sauce of tomatoes, garlic, toasted nuts and olive oil.

Where to Eat and Drink in Penedès

With Fornos, Francas and local chef Oriol Llavina as guides, we’ve compiled some of the Penedès’ essential destinations for getting to know its rich culinary customs and complex history. 

Llopart 

Subirats

The story of the Llopart winery—one of the first in Catalonia to produce sparkling wine—began in the Subirats castle. In the 10th century, a distant Llopart ancestor was hired to help construct the tower, which now overlooks the vineyards. 

According to a document written in Latin from 1385, a man named Bernadus Leopardi acquired the vineyards and moved into the estate’s farmhouse. Some six hundred years later, Leopardi’s descendants discovered the document in a hidden room. 

Book the winery’s “Origins” tour for the full story, which ends with a three-course lunch of cheese plates, plum-roasted duck, grilled chicken croquettes and cod fritters at the farmhouse’s long wooden banquet table to the backdrop of the jagged Montserrat peaks.

The Llopart family produced their first bottle of sparkling wine, called simply Espumos, in 1887. Its label featured a map of the property, which can still be found on each bottle of Llopart sparkling wines. The company has a diverse line of still wines as well. 

Although Llopart grows the traditional Cava grape varieties, the winery does not belong to the Cava Denomination of Origin. It’s part of a modern movement of Penedès winemakers trying to recapture the terroir that they say’s been lost in the Cava industry’s frenzied push to mass-produce a budget sparkling wine. 

In the 2010s, Llopart, along with Júlia Bernet, Gramona and a handful of other local winemakers, formed Corpinnat, a collective committed to ecological production and adherence to tradition. (“Corpinnat” is a portmanteau of corazon (heart) and pinna, a Latin word that describes Penedès’ rocky and mineral soil.)