MoxVib

Pepe Raventós crouched and grabbed a rock to show me. There, in the chunk of limestone, I could discern several small marine fossils, testament to the time more than 5 million years ago before the Mediterranean retreated and revealed the fertile lands of the Anoia River basin.

“This is the true essence of what we make here,” Raventós said. “It’s not just the history of the family, it’s about this soil and the minerality it expresses through the grapes,” he said. Those would be grapes native to the region, especially xarel-lo, the mainstay of the sparkling wines from Raventós i Blanc winery, and sumoll, a red variety.

As Raventós described his commitment to biodynamic and regenerative farming, including using horses to plow the vineyards, the jagged line of Montserrat mountain lurked behind a late-November haze. When the sun emerged from time to time, its light glinted off stainless steel tanks across the road at Codorniu, a leading producer of inexpensive cava, Spain’s bubbly. Every few minutes, an 18-wheeler rumbled out of the tank farm on its way to a vast global market. Raventós would pause and watch each truck with disdain and perhaps a hint of wistfulness.

The Raventós family has been growing grapes near the town of Sant Sadurni d’Anoia since 1497, much of that history as owners of Codorniu. In 1872, Josep Raventós returned from a visit to Champagne and made Spain’s first sparkling wines with a second fermentation in the bottle, essentially creating what we know today as cava. His great-grandson, also named Josep, founded Raventós i Blanc in 1986 on the original family estate. By that time, Spain’s Napoleonic-era inheritance laws had divided the company into so many different shares that the family itself fractured and had to sell Codorniu. Today it is owned by The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm.

“I told them they should build it closer to Barcelona and its port,” Raventós said of the distribution center that marred the view of his terroir. “But they built it here.”

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The contrast was stark. Here was an artisan winemaker dedicated to producing exhilarating, mineral and distinctive sparkling wine on the estate his family has farmed for 21 generations, in full view of a behemoth winery that grew out of his family’s legacy and now symbolizes everything Raventós believes is wrong with cava — mass-produced, cheap and forgettable. It mirrored a similar contrast in the market: wine lovers willing to seek out and pay for exceptional wines that express place, history and individuality, and those looking for the cheapest bottle available.

Raventós i Blanc’s recent history is also relevant here. In 2012, Raventós and his father, Manuel, decided they were no longer making cava. They broke from the Cava D.O., the regulatory organization that governs the cava appellation, and began labeling their wines Conca del Riu Anoia as their own unofficial appellation. The move marked their commitment to quality standards more stringent than even those of champagne: Only vintage-dated cuvées made with native grapes (no chardonnay or pinot noir grapes the Cava D.O. allows) and aged on the lees for at least 18 months.

Their defection immediately raised the global profile of Raventós i Blanc. Other producers followed suit. Today, 18 wineries label their wines Classic Penedès and 11 others have formed a group called Corpinnat. They follow standards similar to Raventós i Blanc, though not focused on a specific area or terroir. More recently, the Cava D.O. has tweaked its regulations and begun to emphasize high-end reserve and single-vineyard wines.

Back in the vineyard, trying to ignore the semis, Raventós expressed his belief that xarel-lo is the ideal variety to feature on those minerally ancient seabed soils. Cava, he said, “dilutes xarel-lo with … parellada,” another indigenous variety he considers so inferior that he modifies it with an adjective unsuitable for this newspaper. (Pepe peppers his speech with expletives, usually followed in his exquisite Catalan accent by “Pardon my French.”) He also described his family’s commitment to biodynamic viticulture, including supporting scholarships for young winemakers learning to tend vineyards with horses rather than with tractors. And there’s another project called Can Sumoi, an abandoned vineyard on a steep hillside near the Mediterranean coast that Raventós purchased in 2017 and is restoring to make natural wines.

Marine fossils are not unheard of in vineyards. They’re talismans for vignerons to say their wines express the soul of Earth itself. The chalky soils of the Loire Valley in France often reveal ancient oyster shells. An entire whale skeleton was discovered in 2007 on the grounds of Castello Banfi in Tuscany’s Brunello di Montalcino zone.

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Can we taste ancient geologic history in the wines of Raventós i Blanc? That’s up to our imaginations, perhaps, but imagination is an essential part of wine appreciation. These wines could come from nowhere else, interpreted by someone dedicated to conveying the essence of the Earth to our glass, through the vehicle of grapes. We need to be receptive to the message.

Raventós i Blanc wines are imported and distributed in the Washington, D.C., area by Potomac Selections.

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