Cava the Spanish Xampany
“You should turn the bottle, not the cork,” says Joseph Espelta, owner of the wine shop XAMPANY (pronounced cham-pa-NEE), explaining the proper way to open a bottle ofis crisp Espelta sparkling wine. We´re seated around a table in the back of his large, dimly lit wine shope, which was once his father´s sculpture studio and is now cluttered with hundreds of wine bottles for sale, along with some miscellaneous grape-related artifactsd like vintage-ad posters, cava-flavored toothpaste and antique winemaking and vineyard equipment such as grape presses, dusty scales and tattered baskets. In his deep chain-smoker´s voice, Espelta explains his passion for cava, which he started making himself a few years ago, after working for decades as an agricultural engineer. Cava, which uses production methods very similar to Champagne, is made mainly in the Penedes region and is considered the best-value sparkling wine these days; Espelta´s costs less than a bottle. (The 500 other cavas Espelta sells at the shop range from to a bottle, and he also offers approximately 200 other Spanish wines that vary in price from .50 to 0.) Espelta grabs my notebook and draws pictures of cava bottles on their sides (placed that way during the secondary fermentation stage, when sugar and yeast are added to the grape juices) and upside down (when the cava has matured and the bottles are turned to let the sediment collect in the caps). His enthusiasm is intoxicating – as are the many glasses of cava he shared with us – and we end up staying at Xampany an hour longer than we´d planned. Even a Swedish friend who joins us mid-way through our visit and doesn´t understand a word of Spanish ends up developing a love for cava – no common language needed.