Wine Pleasures – wine tasting tours.

Today we were joined by two Canadians to visit a couple of wineries, Rimarts and Pares Balta. Lois, a sommelier for Nyood Restaurant and Kultura Social, and her partner Joel were touring Spain and contacted Wine Pleasures to organise a one day winery visit programme to experience some superior Spanish cavas & wines. With that thought in mind, we headed straight to Rimarts to meet Ernest Martinez and try some of his cavas. More of a wine maker than a seller, Ernest took us straight down to the cellar to inspect the cavas and explain some different aspects of cavamaking.

More than any of the other producers I have visited, Rimarts put a huge emphasis on handcrafting, watching carefully over every step to ensure the highest quality possible. This dedication was seen especially in the disgorging process, a 24 day endeavour that sees them turning each bottle incrementally, one eighth each day until the bottle is fully upright. Seeing as the winery is solely run by Ernest, his mother and his brother, this requires a lot of dedication from the trio. This commitment was also seen in the corking process, which involves 60,000 bottles being corked by hand. Ernest demonstrated the corking for us, which was a bit nervewracking, purely because to get the cork on he had to first get the original top off, something that he had to do incredibly quickly and then jam his finger on to stop the cava all fizzing out. Corking wasn´t something I had ever considered but it was quite elaborate and time consuming process. After the excitement of corking, we tried four wines varying in price between €8 and €23. Starting with €8 Brut Cava, my taste buds were clearly unrefined as I preferred this one to all others.

Amy Wilkerson, wine travel writer for Wine Pleasures.

Watch the video and see how the degorge is done in “seco” ie without freezing the neck of the bottle. Only Cava producer to do the degorge in this way for his range of cavas.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnh9Ffxqqd0&hl=es&fs=1&]