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

By WineBottleMag
March 9, 2025
Birthplace Cava Drinking Eating Guide Penedès Region Spains
With 0 comments

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 Baix 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.

Photography by Eoin Mcloghlin

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.)

let adType_67cb959691552 = “leaderboard”;
// Create the element
let script_67cb959691552 = document.createElement(“script”);

script_67cb959691552.innerHTML = `
window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []};
googletag.cmd.push(function() {

var mapping;
// Size mapping for leaderboard ads
var lbmapping = googletag.sizeMapping()
.addSize([1024, 0], [[970, 250], [970, 90], [1, 1], [728, 90]])
.addSize([728, 0], [[728, 90], [1, 1]])
.addSize([320, 0], [[1, 1], [300, 50], [300, 100], [320, 50], [320, 100]])
.addSize([0, 0], [[1, 1], [320, 50]])
.build();
// Size mapping for med rectengle ads
var medrecmapping = googletag.sizeMapping()
.addSize([1024, 0], [[300, 600],[300, 250]])
.addSize([728, 0], [300, 250])
.addSize([320, 0], [[1, 1],[300, 250]])
.addSize([0, 0], [[1, 1], [300, 250]])
.build()
//var lbSlots = [[[320, 100], [728, 90], [300, 100], [1, 1], [300, 50], [970, 250], [320, 50], [970, 90]]];
//var medrecSlots = [[300, 600], [1, 1], [300, 250]];

mapping = adType_67cb959691552 == ‘leaderboard’ ? lbmapping : medrecmapping;
googletag.defineSlot(‘/39808611/article_page/article_leaderboard_1’, [],
‘div-gpt-ad-67cb959691552’).addService(googletag.pubads()).defineSizeMapping(mapping);
googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest();
googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); //maybe optional
googletag.pubads().refresh(); //maybe optional
googletag.enableServices();

});
`;

//checking to see if script is inserted in the header successfully
if (document.head.appendChild(script_67cb959691552)) {
//variable holding the rendering body
document.getElementById(“gptBodySection-67cb959691552”).innerHTML = `

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(div-gpt-ad-67cb959691552); });

`;
}

Corpinnat grapes must be harvested manually and the wine produced entirely on the vineyard’s premises, all in the service of land stewardship and traditional methods.

“It’s about territory and romanticism,” says Pere Llopart, a member of the family’s 25th generation and the head enologist. “To delineate clearly where specifically the grape comes from. It’s those small nuances of soil, climate and territory that gives wines their peculiarities.”

The saline soil of the Subirats hills and the surrounding Ordal Mountains, for example, is a remnant of the primeval sea that covered the region in its distant past.

“The sea receded, but the shells and the fish remained,” says Francas. “So, in a lot of the sparkling wines, there are notes of salinity.” Find this in Llopart’s Leopardi Brut Nature. Aged 66 months, it smells distinctly of the hard crystalline stones in the furthest depths of a prehistoric sea cave.

Vinseum

Vilafranca del Penedès

Situated below the 15th century Basilica de Santa Maria in the historic heart of Vilafranca del Penedès, Vinseum—which Francas calls “the most important museum in Catalan wine history”—is just as much about wine as it is the people who’ve drank it here over the millennia.

The exhibit begins with a collection of 2,700-year-old Greek anforas, once used to transport wine across vast distances, fossilized grape seeds from the 7th century B.C., and a collection of ancient Iberian chalices.

Wind your way through the eccentric and at times disorienting museum, which maximizes the relatively small space with liberal use of dioramas and infinity mirrors, and you might forget that wine is the focus here.

Among the rare and surreal objects you’ll find are an ancient bust of the Greek fertility and harvest goddess Demeter, a bottle in the shape of 19th-century Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, a drunk simulator that displays literary fragments as they might appear to someone who’s had one too many glasses of Cava, a collection of vintage wine labels and a miniature theater playing a montage of famous movie wine scenes.

The exhibit ends with a wine tasting, included in the €10 admission, which features a rotating local winery from the museum’s list of partners, a list that includes Llopart, as well as Gramona, Torreblanca and Raventós-Basagoiti. By the time you’ve finished your glass, you may be starting to think like Fornos.

“Wine, unlike many other agricultural products, has an incalculable added value because it can be understood as a cultural phenomenon,” he says.

Predictably, the Vinseum tavern is no typical museum cafe. It is an extension of the museum itself and thus a wine nerd’s paradise, the walls lined with prestigious local labels like Mestres and Júlia Bernet alongside a diverse selection of low-intervention Catalan wines difficult to find elsewhere, like La Fita’s Vinya de la Creu Macabeo, or Xavier Pallejà’s Buxus de les Aubagues Carinyena.

Llavina, whose restaurant, El Cigró D’Or has an entirely Catalan wine menu, considers Vinseum’s selection of local wines to be among the region’s best.

“It has a fantastic offer, wines by the glass from all over Catalonia, because Vinseum is a wine museum for all of Catalonia, not just Penedès,” Llavina says.

The decor is sparse, practical and modern, and there’s a covered courtyard terrace with ample seating. It’s worth lingering for, especially considering every bottle on the menu is offered by the glass—perhaps the only chance you’ll get to sample some of the rarer labels without spending exuberantly. Glasses start at around €4, while the more exclusive labels, like Clos Mogador’s 2020 Vi de Finca from Priorat, push €18 a glass.

L’Angelus

Vilafranca del Penedès

Across the plaza from Vinseum is L’Angelus, a personal favorite of both Francas and Fornos. If Vinseum is the oenophile’s playground, then L’Angelus is his cathedral.

The tiny, nondescript wine bar is intimate, with just five tables and a few bar seats; the indoor portion (there’s an outdoor terrace as well) is essentially a long hallway with a bar and a set of mirrors that eventually bulges into a small dining room.

Besides a cluster of framed sketches of the Catalan countryside and a poster with the words Pagesia o Mort! (Catalan for “peasantry or death!”) L’Angelus is devoid of decor beyond the colorful bottles that line its walls.

Here, wine is king. Its by-the-glass list changes regularly and its tapas menu—which offers a range of Catalan sausages and cheeses, traditional roasted artichokes and a platter of fragrant arbequina olives—complements what’s being poured.

This is not the place for a casual tourist looking for a generic tortilla de patata and run-of-the-mill house wine; this is a place for contemplating the velvety contours and citrusy pangs of Montpicolis vineyard’s Malvasia de Sitges, or sampling a young indigenous red variety from Penedès, like Carinyena or Sumoll.

Francas notes that Sumoll in particular has seen particular hype. Despite decades of commercial decline due to the market dominance of the Cava industry’s white varietals, its subtle profile, gentle hues and acidity have contributed to its growing popularity. “It has the light color and structure in line with the current drinking trend,” Francas says. “And it’s a variety with great natural acidity, which, with the climate crisis, is hard to achieve as acidity falls with heat.”

Cal Xim

Sant Pau d’Ordal

It takes only a rudimentary knowledge of pairing to understand that roasted vegetables can be unfriendly to wine. Their gaseous, earthen flavours are prone to clash with the drink’s astringency.

How then, does the culinary tradition of Penedès, and Catalonia at large—where flame roasted vegetables are a major pillar of the farm-to-table cooking style—reconcile its seemingly contradictory loves?

Lunch at Cal Xim, a restaurant in the village of Sant Pau d’Ordal in the rolling chaparral of the Alt Penedès wine country, might provide some answers. In the orderly wood dining room warmed by an open fireplace, expect crisp white tablecloths, Michelin-level execution and an encyclopedic array of Catalan and Spanish bottles, for no more than €100 for a substantial dinner for two.

let adType_67cb959692218 = “leaderboard”;
// Create the element
let script_67cb959692218 = document.createElement(“script”);

script_67cb959692218.innerHTML = `
window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []};
googletag.cmd.push(function() {

mapping = adType_67cb959692218 == ‘leaderboard’ ? lbmapping : medrecmapping;
googletag.defineSlot(‘/39808611/article_page/article_leaderboard_2’, [],
‘div-gpt-ad-67cb959692218’).addService(googletag.pubads()).defineSizeMapping(mapping);
googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest();
googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); //maybe optional
googletag.pubads().refresh(); //maybe optional
googletag.enableServices();

});
`;

//checking to see if script is inserted in the header successfully
if (document.head.appendChild(script_67cb959692218)) {
//variable holding the rendering body
document.getElementById(“gptBodySection-67cb959692218”).innerHTML = `

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(div-gpt-ad-67cb959692218); });

`;
}

A flower-shaped endive salad draped in a light mustard vinaigrette and centered around a knot of glistening, rose-colored Iberian ham is a good start, but find the best of Cal Xim in the characteristic char of its brasa, or grill.

“They’re the best known,” Llavina says, “and probably the ones that work the finest grill. And they don’t complicate things.”

The Escalivada—eggplant, tomato, red pepper and onion slow-cooked until tender and caramelized—is delightfully smokey and served with a rich romesco sauce. So are the calçots, which deviate from tradition only in that they come pre-shucked, allowing diners to savor the sweet inner flesh without getting too dirty.

The roasted artichokes are tender and meats are seasoned with the deep charcoal flavor of the Catalan grill. As for wine, Francas suggests either a Riesling or a young, medium-body Penedès red to avoid dissonant pairing.

Cal Lluis 1887

Sant Martí Sarroca

For an alternative to charred dishes, head to the historic Cal Lluis restaurant, in Sant Martí Sarroca. Here you’ll find impressive and hearty platters of acorn-fed Iberian ham, smokey chorizos and house-made spiced pâtés, all served with fresh-baked bread and local olive oil.

The 138-year-old establishment, now in the hands of the great-grandchildren of Teresa Casulleres and Lluís Gili—who built the restaurant in 1884 originally as a specialty food shop, inn and wine cellar—is a place of tradition and class, where the foods of Catalonia are presented in their purest form.

Pair them with a fondue course, or a Rioja from the restaurant’s extensive wine cellar, which spills into the dining room with a well-lit display, proudly showcasing wines from throughout Catalonia, Spain and beyond.

En Rima

Vilafranca del Penedès

En Rima, a gastronomic space inside the Heretat Mastinell vineyard’s five-star hotel, takes its name from winemaking. “Rima” (which translates “rhyme”) refers to the position of a bottle of sparkling wine during the second fermentation, where it’s stacked horizontally and left for months while carbonation develops.

Located in the outskirts of Vilafranca del Penedès, the building is a destination in its own right. Designed by Barcelona studio GCA Architects, the hotel evokes a stack of space-age fermentation barrels sheltered under an undulating, Gaudi-esque roof. Ask for a table by the windows in order to dine with a backdrop of sprawling fields of grapevines.

The open kitchen is the first thing you’ll see upon entry, where a small team of cooks work calmly to produce a menu of traditional Catalan ingredients remixed to haute tastes. A burrata with confit mini leeks and pumpkin romesco sauce, cod and ratatouille garnished with sweet potato foam and a decadent risotto of prawn-head emulsion, to name a few.

Should you want more time to admire the otherworldly architecture, a night at the Mastinell hotel might cost anywhere from €170-€500 for a standard suite, depending on time of year.