|
|
Due to three years of drought in Catalonia, cava giant Freixenet will use grapes from growing regions other than Penedès. As the small 2023 harvest, with a drop of up to 55 per cent in quantity, yielded too few grapes from the D.O. Cava appellation, Freixenet will be launching a declassified sparkling wine from August 2024 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the most important Cava export market, with grapes from other regions. The "Freixenet Premium Sparkling Wine - Cuvée de España" will be produced using the Charmat method instead of the traditional bottle fermentation method.
2023 was a record year for the D.O. with almost 252 million bottles sold. However, the worst dry period on the Iberian peninsula in 1,200 years, according to the specialist journal Nature Geoscience, will also affect yields in 2024, even though it rained in Catalonia in March and at Easter. A state of emergency was declared in the region back in February. Six million people in Barcelona and the 201 neighbouring cities are affected. Water consumption has been severely restricted, as has the irrigation of vineyards and other agricultural land. A spokesman for the agricultural union of Catalonia warned that a third of the vines would not sprout this year and that the drought would reduce production by around 60 million bottles if it did not rain sufficiently in April.
In future, the Cava Regulatory Council wants to allow wineries to store reserves of base wines for up to three years. This is intended to compensate for fluctuations in the production of Cava de Guarda, the simplest category. However, the premium categories Cava de Guarda Superior (Reserva, Gran Reserva and Paraje Calificado) would still have to be vintage sparkling wines.
(al, spk / Source: decanter)