Drink - Victoria Moore samples the Barcelona bubbly
Take one vegetarian, wheat-allergic, travel-sick, sun-allergic, non-smoking non-drinker and give her to me for a week. Within days, she is not merely imbibing according to my core holiday programme, but enjoying it, too: cold beer in the afternoon; Campari and orange as the sun skids towards the horizon; a few chilled glasses of Torres Vina Esmeralda (our favourite wine of this Spanish holiday, with its fresh, floral elderflower nose and elegant taste), before lapsing into tumblers chock-full of ice and amaretto poured, unmeasured, from the bottle. The secret is to ease her in with a glass of fizzy, which no one can politely refuse.
Here in Barcelona, land of GaudI, Picasso and Miro, there is good reason to drink sparkling white wine. Cava, Spain's answer to champagne (and how the Spanish bridle at such second-cousin classification) is produced mainly in Catalonia, with only about 5 per cent of the total haul being made elsewhere in the country. Before cava came along in 1872, the Spanish were perfectly content to drink champagne. Now they have moved on to cava, but the rest of the world, it seems, hasn't quite. Champagne has the market as tightly sewn up as a classy whore's drawers. Everyone wants it, only those who can afford it can get it and the rest can slum it on cava.
The Spanish have a battle to fight on two fronts. First, they must persuade us that their sparkler is up to scratch; then, they have to get us to drink more of it. It's not looking good. Freixenet, one of the two largest cava suppliers, has been denying rumours of export oversupply, wafting around prized reorders from Germany as proof that bottles of cava have been drunk rather than piled up in warehouses across Europe.
But the latest issue of Barcelona Business has better news. A small, timorous headline squeaks that "cava can be a world-beater". Rubbish headline aside, the story looks good at a first glance: cavas from DS Chandon and Raventos Blanc beat champagne from the market leader Moet & Chandon in a recent comparative tasting. Time, surely, to crack open a few bottles and celebrate? And yet. Is it unfair to note that this great victory was achieved at a Spanish tasting? Perhaps this should not undermine the case, but it does. Cava has a quite different taste from champagne. It spends less time on the lees, and is less yeasty tasting for it. It's also less acidic (which means that you can get through more bottles of it before tummy ache strikes). It is also made from different grapes, although Chardonnay is common to both drinks. This means that when most people taste cava they are trying to match it, taste-bud tingle by taste-bud tingle, to an invisible palate that matches their idea of a perfect champagne. Of course it will be found wanting. Unless the taster is Spanish. And then there is such dross around. A bad cava is like a bad play - there are too many of them and, once you've embarked on the performance, you feel obliged to sit it out - after a few bad experiences, no one can be bothered any more.
But there are good cavas, too. In Barce-lona, we sip the house brand (poured from a one-litre bottle with a Grolsch-style lid) in a cava bar. Business is thriving. The Spanish nip in at the end of the day to sit between the mosaic-tiled walls and wash down pieces of artichoke and smoked fish with a couple of glasses. In a week, we seem to drink more fizz between us than must have been consumed to launch the Tate Modern, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Somerset House. My favourite by a mile is Codorniu 1551. And it's so cheap. You can buy thousands and thousands of bottles before you even get close to the price of a Picasso sketch. And I know which I'd rather have.
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