Recaredo rightly holds a formidable reputation as Spain’s greatest producer of sparkling wines. The domaine’s origins date back to 1924 when Josep Mata Capellades, a professional disgorger, decided to build a cellar under his house and cultivate his own vineyard in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, a village in the heart of Catalonia’s Alt Penedés region. He called his new winery Recaredo after his father, Recaredo Mata Figueres.

From humble beginnings, Mata grew his holdings while forging his distinctive style, pioneering the production of brut nature sparkling wines, using oak barrels and crafting long-aged sparkling wines with the Xarel·lo grape variety. Mata’s sons continued in their father’s footsteps, and today, it is his grandson, Ton Mata, who heads up the winery.

Under Ton’s direction, Recaredo has become a worldwide reference point for sparkling wine. Recaredo is a pioneer on many levels; not only was it the first producer in the Penedès region to be certified biodynamic (in 2010), but it uses exclusively estate-grown fruit, and all the grapes are picked by hand and vinified in its own cellars in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia.

Mata’s philosophy has long been about crafting wines of place rather than conforming to a particular style. For this reason, Recaredo left the sprawling Cava D.O. in 2018 to join Corpinnat, an organisation then comprising nine leading wineries in Alt Penedés. Inspired by Champagne’s Récoltant-Manipulant model, Corpinnat was established to distinguish the great sparkling wines made in the heart of Penedès, a region whose traditional-method sparkling wine history dates back to the end of the 19th century.

Corpinnat’s manifesto includes arguably the strictest guidelines overseeing any sparkling wine production in the world. This includes working with 100% organic grapes, harvesting by hand, minimum ageing requirements and vinification at the estate. Today, only 12 producers have met such rigorous obligations. Corpinnat is not an easy club to get into.

Recaredo’s vineyards are amongst the most immaculate and precisely tended we have visited. All the plots, of which there are many, lie within 25km of the cellars in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia in the Corpinnat territory—an area of mainly calcareous soils and hilly Mediterranean landscapes dominated by the Montserrat Mountains. The vineyards are dry-farmed and planted only with the region’s local varieties, notably Xarel·lo, which accounts for 60% of Recaredo’s production. Draught horses plough the top vineyards, and only organic fertilisers are applied when necessary.

Recaredo only makes vintage-dated wines. Yields are some of the lowest you will find in the world of sparkling wine: 40 hl/ha would not be a wild estimate over the past decade. Fermentation is triggered by vineyard yeasts originally isolated in 1999, and Mata still uses a large proportion of large oak barrels for fermentation—more so in the single-vineyard and long-aged labels. Unusually for the region, secondary fermentations occur without adding cane sugar. Instead, the secondary fermentation uses grape juice from the following vintage. Aging takes place under natural cork only, a homage to the family’s tradition and the terroir-driven house style.

All the wines spend at least 30 months on lees and up to 15 years or more in their cellars for the top cuvée. Then, all the riddling is done in-house, and the disgorgements―which take place without freezing―are done manually by a group of artisans who expel the lees. All this is to say, Recaredo’s practice in vineyard and cellar would not look out of place next to a very top grower Champagne outfit. As The Wine Advocate’s Luis Gutiérrez has written: “I’m not sure if there is any other sparkling wine producer in the world who works with such strict standards.”

Under Recaredo’s management, Xarel·lo has emerged as a faithful communicator of terroir and a variety that ages and improves in bottle like few others. This Catalan variety started as a red grape before mutating into a white variety. Perhaps for this reason, Xarel·lo is high in antioxidant and phenolic compounds—more than some red varieties—promoting its astonishing ageing potential while lending an attractive salty-bitter sensation to the wine’s finish.

Like all the world’s greatest fizz, these are, first and foremost, fine wines. “These are more than just sparkling wines—they are long-aged white wines,” says Ton Mata. “The bubbles must allow you to see the wine; they must not hide the wine.” When tasting in the context of a meal, these wines take on another level of complexity, evolving with air and taking you on a journey. It’s not very often you come by a sparkling wine producer where the quality and character of the wines match the greatest growers in Champagne. Yet that is precisely what you get with Recaredo.