The revolutionary descendent of the creator of the first Spanish sparkling wine makes his bubblies within Raventos i Blanc estate, while Can Sumoi, a completely different project on a long abandoned, ancient land focused on artisan still wines. So far. Now Muntanya, the first sparkling wine of Can Sumoi has been born, from a land between 400 and 700 meters of altitude, with calcareous alluvial loam soils.
Living in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, I know the vineyards of Raventos i Blanc very well – at least once a week I go jogging to the Anoia river, and doing so, I run past the little lake (funny enough, it is their lake, yet Codorníu calls it Lake Codorníu), near the place where the sheep and goats chew their daily glass in perfect tranquility, and by the little hill, where no machines can enter, only horses. I can see the stones with fossils all around, and I am accompanied by buzzing bees and butterflies – so I have first-hand experience about the low intervention cultivation of Raventos i Blanc. I have also taken some of my groups to the winery to do a visit and tasting, these were also great experiences. The wines are undoubtedly great, elegant and complex, like impeccably carved marble sculptures. My favourite is the one, which is the less “marble-like”, which has some savage character, it is the Textures de Pedra made of three local grapes.
Can Sumoi, the other estate has more of this “savage” blood, probably due to the many years the roots absorbed minerals, flavours and history.
“There are wines that are more than the reflection of a landscape: they are the cry and the memory. Muntanya is one of them. A sparkling wine that reclaims the highlands of Montmell —austere, fragile, yet full of life— and that gives voice to the uniqueness of this corner of the world, filled with memory but also with absence.”
Muntanya 2024 is made of Macabeu and Xarel·lo, and the wine fermented with the vineyard’s own native yeast, and aged in the bottle for a year. Extra Brut with 3.5 g/L residual sugar.
It is fresh, what is more, vibrant, it has its fruitiness, but for me the leading sensation is some flinty-salty note. The savage character I was talking about. When I tasted, a novel occured to me that I have read recently by Irene Solà, a great Catalan writer. The book “I Gave You Eyes and You Looked towards Darkness” is about several generations of women living in the same house in the mountains, mystic and bloody, cruel and beautiful.
More information about Muntanya and Can Sumoi
My earlier interview with Pepe Raventos
