Gramona
Book the cellar tour and the aged-cava tasting. III Lustros is the wine to buy. The reason sommeliers now take cava seriously.
The grower-cava benchmark — a 130-year-old Penedès estate making long-aged, vintage cavas on the lees that rival good Champagne. The estate that changed cava's reputation.
At a Glance
- — You dismiss cava as supermarket fizz
Gramona sits in the rolling Penedès, and it is the standard-bearer of grower cava: a house that treats sparkling wine with the same seriousness as Champagne. They were early champions of long aging, holding bottles on the lees for years to build a creamy, savory texture. A cellar tour is an exercise in patience, past corridors of bottles waiting on release. For anyone who wants to understand why cava now earns a place beside the world's best sparkling wines, this is the visit.
How it got here
The Batlle family began cultivating vines in the Penedès during the mid nineteenth century. Josep Batlle first pressed grapes on the current property in 1881. The house later joined forces with the Gramona family, combining viticultural expertise with commercial experience in the sparkling wine trade. This lineage informs the current focus on long aging processes. The winery operates within the Penedès, a region that transformed its production methods during the late twentieth century to prioritize quality and site specificity. These techniques rely on the legacy of early growers who rejected industrial shortcuts in favor of slow cellar maturation.
Where it sits
Rolling hills of vines stretch between the coastal ranges and the inland plains of Catalonia. Low stone walls divide plots across the landscape, while small stone farmhouses punctuate the horizon. Sunlight strikes the clay-limestone soil throughout the year, ripening the xarel-lo and macabeu grapes. Winters bring mist from the Mediterranean, keeping the soil damp, while summer afternoons turn dry and golden. Trains and roads connect the vineyard slopes to the nearby city, yet the pace within the vine rows remains dictated by the harvest cycles and the cellar temperatures that define the vintage.
What to eat and drink
Cava anchors the local glass, particularly brut nature styles that retain the crispness of the base wines. The Penedès table favors xató, a salad of endive, salt cod, tuna, and olives dressed in a thick sauce of toasted almonds, hazelnuts, and ñora peppers. Butifarra, a mild pork sausage, frequently accompanies white beans sautéed with garlic and parsley. For those seeking heartier fare, suquet de peix serves as the standard, a Catalan fisherman stew of rockfish and potatoes thickened with a picada of almonds and fried bread.
Catalonia: the whole region
Barcelona is the anchor and most trips never leave it, which is a mistake but not a fatal one: Girona, Tarragona and the Costa Brava's coves are all within two hours by train or a short drive, and the Empordà behind them holds the best…
Minimum 4 days · better 7-8 days · deep 2 weeks
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In Catalonia
In Catalonia
In Catalonia
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