This wine is absolutely wonderful.
A fantastic alternative to champagne. Very good on its own (perhaps this is not a surprise), but excellent too with seafood and warm salads. Layers of apple and pear, herbs and cashew nuts lead to a creamy, flavour-filled palate with a stellar, long finish.
We all love really good sparkling wine.
And in a time when Champagne prices seem to be ratcheting up without much sign of slowing down, ones realistic pool for securing great fizz can seem to be shrinking.
But this wine is really, really good sparkling wine.
In a time when Champagne producers may think that the market will forever sustain its price increases, those in the subzones of Cava have simply continued to make incredibly high quality wine and, broadly speaking, the prices have remained the same.
All that this means, in our eyes, is that you stand to get seriously good quality for much less outlay. This is why we are very excited to be offering this Cava - it is rich, balanced and utterly delicious.
Made from vines that are an average of 40 years old, Blanc de Blancs comes from a single, north-facing vineyard, the Vinya del Llac, which creates a structured, fresh and complex wine. With clay-rich soils on a calcareous bedrock, the precipitation release to the vines is really slow, forcing the vines to dig further and develop stronger root systems. The proximity of the lake (from where the vineyard takes its name) means that there is cooling moisture during the day and heat release at night; this, twinned with the less-sunny northerly exposure is an absolute treat for producing long-ripening, high-acid grapes. The grapes are all white varieties, hence the Blanc de Blancs, and are a blend of the very traditional Peñedes trio of Macabeo, Xarel-lo and Parellada and, since 2015, the winery have included 5% of the delicious and nearly extinct Malvasia de Sitges in the blend too.
Made using gravity-led fermentation and pour-over, the wine is essentially produced in. very natural, gentle manner, other than the cooling of the juice at every stage (to stabilise the fermentation as well as maintaining vibrant aromatics). Fermentation in steel tanks is followed by blending, before the wine is aged for 18 months in bottle in contact with its lees.
The blend is usually 50% Xarel-lo, 30% Macabeo, 15% Parellada and 5% Malvasia de Sitges.
The Raventos family have a viticultural tradition dating back to 1497, making them one of the oldest continuous vineyard owners in the world. Josep Maria Raventos i Fatjo is credited with producing the first Cava in 1872, building a legacy that the following generations of his family have taken very seriously. In 1986 Josep Maria Raventos i Blanc decided to sell his share of the gigantically successful Cordoniu Cava winery, which at that time was still under the ownership of the family. However, he kept the best vineyards for the newly created Raventos i Blanc estate, thereby maintaining the family ownership title. Since its creation, the new Raventos i Blanc winery has had one goal in mind - quality.
Vineyard selection (from their own vines of course), varietal planting and management, with care and gentle management in the winery, have led to significant quality improvements over the past three decades. This quality increase has been seen across the five Cava-producing zones and has prompted the desire of many of the best producers to leave or opt-out of the Cave DO.
Raventos i Blanc are one of them and, since 2013 have been instrumental in the creation of the new Conca del Riu Anoia region, based between the Anoia river and the Mediterranean coast.
With the blank page of a new DO, Pepe Raventos has been able to write the rules - they are fiercely strict! All organic, indigenous grape varieties and with a minimum of 18 months of ageing, the goal to "better understand and convey our viticultural traditions, the strength of our land, our unique grape varieties and the characteristics of "our soils" as he calls it, is going to yield a huge increase in quality. If everyone else in the region adopts it...
