Wine focus: Welcome to cava country

Through the morning haze it seems as though a great paw reached down one day to rip away a piece of the land, leaving the beautiful torn peaks of Montserrat to claw despairingly after their loss into the wide Catalunyan sky.

Beneath wreathe the vines of cava country.

You know. Cava. Fizzy Spanish wine? About half the price of champagne in the supermarkets? That's the one.

It probably comes from here. Nearly all cava is made in the Penedes, in the Catalan-speaking corner of North East Spain, inland from Barcelona and just south of where Salvador Dali was born. And 75 per cent of cava is made in and around one small town: Sant Sadurni d'Anoia.

As you come off the motorway from Barcelona Airport familiar names rise up in front of you: Freixenet... Codorniu... and it seems as though there is a bodega​ on every corner, down every little side street.There are 268 cava houses in all, the vast majority run by families who, like family brewers in Britain, are an idiosyncratic yet comradely bunch, impressively passionate about their wines.

In fact, it's almost embarrassing for the typical Brit who regards cava, if they regard it at all, as cheap and cheerful fizz, to come here and find just how serious a business it is.

Whether cava is 'as good as' champagne is a debatable point for sophisticated palates. But we know that it's made in exactly the same way, and that in the Penedes the best cavas are treated with a similar reverence.

The category also turns out to be rich in variety, tradition, innovation and ambition.Cava Recaredo is a kind of hardcore cava house, making wines for the top end of the market. Run by Ton Mata Moliner, the company was founded by his grandfather in 1924. It specialises exclusively in vintage brut nature cava. That is, all its wines are aged for at least two years and are completely unsweetened. They command respect almost to the point of intimidation.The point for Ton is that his cavas "represent our soils and our climate in the glass". Recaredo gets 70 per cent of its grapes from its own vineyards, which have been organic for the past two years.

Ton is a terroir man. "It's always the soil," he says, standing in the baking sun beside a mound of sweet-smelling, well-fermented manure, all kindly provided by local cows and sheep, which is turned once a month "at the waning moon".It sounds hokey. "But the more we study these practices the more we believe in them," says Ton. "We find scientific reasons for doing it."However dry the growing season, he resists the temptation to irrigate, despite the risk to the crop. "That would just lose the reason for having different vintages!" he argues. And, in a sense, it is also a case of being cruel to be kind. The Recaredo vineyards are a kind of public school for grapes.

"We want to educate the vine to do without water," explains Ton. "That way it becomes stronger and there is more expression in the fruit."

Every eloquent grape is harvested by hand to avoid damaging the skins and causing oxidation. During secondary fermentation, in the process known as 'riddling', each bottle is turned precisely one-eighth of a revolution once a week.What a palaver. Recaredo has yet to find a UK importer, but when it does they will have quite a story to tell.As does Raventos i Blanc, a quite different kind of operation that nevertheless aims to produce nothing less than "the brand of reference" for the cava category.

Begun only in 1996, it's owned and run by father and son Manuel and Pepe Raventos. The family has farmed its own vineyards for a mind-boggling 19 generations and worked for Codorniu - which is just across the road - for 40 years before starting up their own bodega​, housed in a strikingly modern, award-winning piece of architecture.

Pepe describes the Raventos approach as "innovation based on tradition" exemplified by the addition of pinot noir grapes to the traditional cava varietals.

All vineyards are organic and the grapes hand-harvested, with yield a mere 5,000 kilos per hectare compared with the average 12,000, the bodega sacrificing quantity for quality."It's a matter of exclusivity for us," says Pepe. "But we are not fundamentalists of brut nature. There is a terrible confusion around the relationship that has to quality."

Raventos i Blanc cavas are imported into Britain through Waterloo Wine, but Pepe is keen to extend distribution further.Different again is Castell D'Age, a more mainstream cava house that also produces other wines. Its 800 hectares of vineyards boast fabulous views of Montserrat and take a whole day to go round.

This is another family firm, yet the woman in charge is, curiously, Swiss-born. Anne-Marie Junyent married into cava and is a keen advocate of its potential."We have the quality to match champagne," she insists. "But we have to change our own mentality, to persuade ourselves we can do that."

How cava is made

Traditional cava grapes - macabeo, parellada, xarel.lo - make up the bulk of production, but these have now been joined by 'foreign' varietals such as chardonnay and pinot noir.

Wines are made in the usual way and bottled, then sugars and yeasts are added to produce the secondary fermentation that gives cava its fizz.It is then aged in bottle for a minimum of nine months in the 'cava' or caves, towards the end of which time the bottle is 'riddled' to shift the sediments to the neck.

The bottle is opened, a quantity of wine spurts out, removing the sediment, and the bottle is topped up and resealed, ready for sale.It's also available in an increasingly popular rosé style.Pub promotionsTwenty food-led pubs were targeted in the Institut del Cava's latest UK campaign, run with listings magazine Time Out.Each was given a different cava a day for a month. Results varied, but at some pubs the idea really worked well.Selling them at £3.50 a glass, the Ealing Park Tavern sold out.

"We've a well-educated bunch of people coming in here and they will give these things a go," says restaurant manager Naomi Hannah. "We promoted the cavas on big chalkboards and flyers and staff offered people a cava as they came in. We also did it as a kir royale.

"It was surprising and interesting to learn about the different tastes," she adds. "We know what to say about red wine and white wine but had no idea how to talk about cava."We don't do champagne by the glass so if we can get a good cava in it will improve our sales. There's no cava on the list at the moment and I think we lose out by having only champagne."Cava is more people-friendly, more affordable. For £5 more than you'd pay for a glass of champagne you can buy a bottle."

The cava promotion also went down well at the Marquess Tavern in Islington, Time Out's Gastro Pub of the Year."We always like to encourage our clientele to try new things and get interested in other drinks," says licensee Will Beckett. "Cava is a really good product and we might well look at stocking it permanently."