The miraculous secret Spanish wine regions that rival Champagne

When Brits think of a wine trip, the first places that come to mind are likely to be Champagne or Burgundy. Head a little further south, though – a mere stone’s throw from the Costa Brava and Barcelona – and you’ll find the roads of Catalonia less crowded and the wines just as good, though some of them have experienced a name change. Take Cava.

Originally, the sparkling wine produced here was simply called Champagne, but when Spain joined the EU – even though, unlike Prosecco, they use the traditional and identical méthode champenoise –  they had to change the name as it was already a French appellation d’origine contrôlée. So, they started off calling it something roughly translated as “sparkling wine fermented in the bottle and aged in the cave”. This was a bit of a mouthful so it got shortened to the last word – cave or cellar. In Spanish, cava.

Caves in general play quite a role in Catalonia. It was in one such cave amidst the rugged beauty of the jagged massif of Montserrat that, in 880, after a group of young shepherds saw a celestial chorus in the heavens, the local priest discovered a humble image of the Virgin Mary. The resulting place of pilgrimage grew from a Holy Grotto to a magnificent Benedictine monastery reached today by a vertiginous 15 minutes on the cog railway.

Many visitors go simply to hear the boys’ choir sing every day at 1pm, but walk a little further into the mountains, and you start to experience the true scale – and eerie tranquillity – of a place that attracted hermits into its caves some 1,000 years ago.

Without Montserrat, there would probably be no cava, as the great limestone ridge protects the Penedès region from the icy blasts that would otherwise sweep down from the Pyrenees in winter. It’s a region of pretty villages and small traditional towns, like Vilafranca with its Gothic and Art Nouveau architecture. At Vinseum – Vilafranca’s museum of cava – housed in a 13^th-century Palau Reial (royal palace), they have traced the making of cava back at least 2,700 years. The proof is 400 carbon-dated grape seeds found in a nearby vineyard. As a museum guide tells me, “Wine here is not an alcoholic drink. It is culture.”

There are plenty of cava tours and tastings to try, and you can even stay at vineyards – like Casa Bolet, a gorgeous “modern house” (built around 1910) owned by the same family since the early 17^th century. Their original farmhouse, meanwhile, dating from 1619, has a small museum of wine and farming where you also learn about their Cava (and taste it, too, of course).

Cava is not, though, the only wine of Catalonia. Far more famous in Spain – though relatively unknown in the UK – is El Priorat region. Its wine is the only DOQ (Denominació d’Origen Qualificada) in the country other than Rioja. This is a much wilder region than Penedès, its steep black mountains topped with fortress-like villages, their sides terraced with olive groves and vineyards.

There is a sense of drama in the mountains here and their history. The natural fastness of the village of Siurana was the last stronghold of the Moors in Catalonia. Legend has it that Abdelazaia, the Moorish Queen, decided to avoid falling into the hands of the Christians by riding her horse (pure white, of course) over the cliff where the animal stalled, terrified, leaving an imprint of his horseshoe on the rock.

With its jaw-dropping views, stone houses and cobbled streets filled with roses, it’s hardly surprising that Siurana was recently invited to join the list of Spain’s most beautiful villages. They declined, not being too keen on the idea of all those pesky tourists hearing about it. (Sorry, Siurana.)

The Montsant mountains here are made up of black slate on which grow the remarkable wines of Priorat. Particularly notable are their reds. On this nutrient-poor land, the grapes have to dig deep to survive and the resulting wines are robust and mineral-rich.

While wine growing here is measured in millennia, it really got going at the end of the 12^th century when – you guessed it – there was a miracle. A shepherd saw a group of angels on a scala dei (stairway to God) and a priory (priorat) was built there by Carthusian monks, who created a feudal system of viticulture. The rest, as they say, is history.

Essentials

Anna Selby travelled as a guest of the Spanish Tourist Office in the UK (spain.info), and of Pura Aventura (01273 676712; pura-aventura.com), which has the Barcelona & Catalan Wine Route trip from £1,850pp, based on two sharing, including seven nights’ B&B accommodation, one dinner, car hire, guided activities (e-bike tour, Gaudi house night visit, three winery tours, Montserrat visit and private transfers). International travel costs extra; rail options are available.