![]() Xarel-lo, the grape that almost single-handedly defines Gramona, is admired for its high resveratrol levels, the anti-oxidants enabling the wines to stay fresh even after years of storage. The yeast gives it elegance and balance and complexity, and you need good terroir and good grapes, which in our case has to do with Xarel-lo.” Now we know that 80 percent of the complexity of the wine is related to the yeast, but the yeast work is the same in Australia, in California, or in France, so this makes it a kind of democracy in terms of sparkling wine. Microbiology, as a science, only came to the sparkling wine world in the last 15 years. ![]() We only knew that with the secondary fermentation there were some amino acids that were giving some complexity. Thirty years ago nobody knew what the yeast was doing to the wine. “But what does ageing mean? It means more time with the yeast in the bottle. Ageing matters and is the common factor when you consider the iconic producers. Celler Batlle is 10 years and Enoteca is 12 to 14 years. Our youngest wines are like this – the 2008 you’re drinking is aged from four to five years – and the Imperial five to six years. Xavier sees no reason why Gramona cannot compete with the likes of Dom Perignon, those very fine wines that he says “are all around 10 years of ageing, on average, and in our case we even go up to 14 years. I find myself seduced by its white-flower traces, toasty biscuit notes and sweet lemon finish. What Xavier calls “the baby” of the range is the 2008 Brut Vintage Gran Reserva that sells for merely $200 a pop, and is what we drink as we talk. Gramona’s top drop is its Enoteca Brut, a Xarel-lo/Macabeo cuvée aged 14 years before release, selling at HK$1,400 a bottle, while two others I also found likeable, the Imperial Gran Reserva and Celler Batlle Gran Reserva, are $340 and $600 respectively. Jaume now heads a team of seven winemakers at the Gramona estate in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, while maintaining a foot in academia – he runs the only sparkling wine department in Spain, at the Universidad de Tarragona – while Xavier, essentially the company’s brand ambassador (though his title is “vice-president”) spreads the family gospel.īefore I’d tasted Gramona, I thought the idea amusing – cava made deliberately to age? Yes, I learned, and with price points to match. ![]() Xavier quit the bank and reunited with Jaume, who had by then graduated from the university in Dijon as the first Spanish person to do so with a specialisation in sparkling wine. Talking to Montalbán made me come back to the family tradition.” He knew I was then not in the business and he said I had to continue the winemaking heritage of my family. “He thought Gramona was the best sparkling wine he had ever drunk. Stunned, the young Gramona made contact with Montalbán in 1993 and a meeting was arranged, and over coffee in Barcelona the novelist explained why he was so spellbound. My friend asked me: ‘Does this have anything to do with your name?’” A friend in London first told me that Montalbán had a character in his novels, a detective who is a gastronomic expert in Barcelona who, when he has to forget about a woman or has a sad moment or has to celebrate, he always does it with Gramona. “But what really happened was I met the Catalan writer Manuel Vásquez Montalbán. “I was a banker, and I was 35 years old,” he recalls. With both of them gone, I decided I had to come back to Spain in 1995. My father had stopped working after he turned 72 and then he passed away, and my brother also passed away. It was a much bigger company when my grandfather was doing it. And from Paris I went on to London, where I worked in banking.”įinancial wizards are known to morph into wine producers, since they always know the bottom line, so how’s that unusual? “Well, Gramona was under the management of my uncle, Jaume’s father, but he was not interested in speaking other languages, not willing to travel, so the company was very small. We’re both strong characters and I didn’t have a good relationship with him, and so I left to go to Paris instead to study economics. I had been out there working, harvesting with my grandfather, but I had a discussion with my father when I was 18. “We are the fifth generation now – originally, it was me and my brother and our cousin Jaume – but I am the oldest and I was supposed to the company. “I studied oenology at the university in Dijon, but only for a few months,” Xavier Gramona tells me during a visit to Hong Kong. In the case of vintage cava producer Gramona, one man’s career transition proved vital, though it arose from a somewhat unusual epiphany. There’s no business like the wine family business, where bonds forged by tradition often drive a brand’s core values.
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