Cava, Passion, Life

Feb. 11 2011

Cava.

Liquid joy.

All the sun’s warmth and light in a glass.

Fleeting little bubble sprites jostling in spirals up to the top of the flute to merrily announce themselves to the world with a tiny ping before expiring! The ping? Have you never heard it? Pour a glass, put your ear up real close, and you’ll hear the music of the bubble sprites. My beloved friends. My steadfast companions through joy and sadness.

Cava saturates and satiates all the senses.

Cava is the Catalonian version of champagne. The name ‘champagne’ may only be used for sparkling wine crafted using the méthode Champenoise in the region of Champagne, France. Cava is made using the méthode Champenoise, but in Catalonia. On the dry, rugged, arid, sun-drenched terraced hills of Catalonia, my second, much-missed home on the Mediterranean.

To me, cava is joy, delight, companionship, hedonism, love, passion. What would my life be like without it?

My first cava accomplice was my ex-mother-in-law, Montse. Poor woman, from a household of men who didn’t share her love of this ambrosia. Along I came, and we both agreed: we loved her son, we loved cava. Sunday afternoon meals always called for a bottle, semi-sweet, with dessert. But soon we turned to the time-honored way to honor the Catalan Sunday meal: very dry cava with the entire meal, and then… perhaps… if the mood carried us, another bottle with dessert. But forget the semi-sweet; real connoisseurs only drink the dry. It’s the good stuff, after all. Asti Spumante and its callow siblings? Kool-Aid with bubbles. An insult to cava. Perish the thought! May it be banned from Earth! Give me dry or give me… well just give me dry, extra dry, brut nature!

The pop of the cork – the sound of joy! The search for the cork – my daughter’s first game, crawling around her grandparents’ floor. A smile of joy as she finds it! You see? Cava even brings joy to an infant. Am I corrupting her? No, I’m teaching her how to live life and how to love life!

Glasses all around, fill them up – oops! Not full for my ex-father-in-law, just a bit. Sourpuss. But that’s great! More for us, the look Montse and I dart to each other in furtive delight acknowledges. A splash spills on the table from over-eagerness? No problem – laugh and dab it on everyone’s forehead for good luck, and then the toast. To what? To whatever! To everything! To nothing in particular! To us, to the world, to love, to family, to togetherness, to the cava itself! The first sip. Ahhhh… eyes closed, savoring the moment, the flavor, the scent, the tingling, the conviviality, the sheer pleasure.

My husband didn’t last, but I still share a bottle of cava with my ex-mother-in-law from time to time. And with the ex-aunts-in-law, too, joyful women all of them, Montse, Pili, Paquita. After all, we may no longer agree on loving the son, but we still share our love of cava. It’s a woman thing, in that family at least.

Years of mourning for a lost marriage, a dismembered future. Weekend nights alone, missing my daughter when she was with Daddy. A friend lends me the entire Sex and the City series. I begin watching, mid-winter, mid-depressed, Saturday night entertainment being a benjamín, a small, personal-sized bottle of cava (OK, some nights maybe two of them…), a bowl of popcorn and Laughing Cow cheese. A makeshift meal for a sad woman. But as I watch and eat and drink, Carrie and the girls inspire me to get my moxie back. That’s what’s wrong with me! I’m missing men!

I’m back…!!!

As I’m trying my awkward hand at post-divorce dating, we run out of the cava we’re drinking at a dinner with friends to celebrate their new house. Yes, we drink the restaurant dry, although in our defense there are 12 of us. The only cava left is a somewhat unknown brand: Privat Evolució. Never heard of it. It comes in a tall, lean, elongated bottle. Hmm. We sniff around the bottle, looking for where it’s from – cava is judged by its region in Catalonia. Just up the coast. OK, what the heck, pour it out. The waiters pour, we toast, we drink…

Time stops. It’s thin as a blade, sharp, goes down so smoothly it’s gone before you can barely grasp a fugitive taste of it. It’s exquisite. It’s beyond exquisite. It’s what life’s about. I’m home. I’ve found my cava.

Next day I go shopping. All the wine cellars and gourmet shops I know. No one sells it. I despair for weeks, then finally think “online”, still a relatively new concept at the time. So I Google it and find an online-only gourmet shop in Barcelona that will deliver it to my house by the case. I order a case.  It comes in a large wooden crate that I open with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning. Inside, each compartment is a bottle lovingly wrapped in some strange paper-cardboard bubble concoction. I unwrap and unwrap and unwrap – my environmental conscience weighing heavily – and behold! A tube! The Privat comes in a sleek, elaborately printed, glossy cardboard tube with metallic stoppers on either end to protect the bottles. I feel gleeful – my cava is elegant, classy. I open the tube and carefully slide out that long, beautiful bottle. My cava! I believe I might have even cradled it, embraced it, although there are no witnesses to corroborate that. Now all I need is someone to drink it with.

Cava becomes the bellwether in my dating life as I venture back onto the scene. I meet a man: if he likes cava, I like him, he likes me; if he doesn’t like cava, I don’t like him, no spark, no chemistry, and it’s mutual. It’s not intentional; it just happens that way.

Narcis was the first. Narcis: handsome, outrageously masculine, sexy, oozing pheromones, brilliant, piercing. Later, I find out, also nutty, paranoid, obsessive. But the first impression on the first date was captivating, sitting outdoors in a charming square, mid-July, the sun hot as blazes, a mediaeval church peering down over us, lively chatter, the caprice of ordering a glass of cava midday in the heat – having discovered intriguingly that the other loves cava, too. The first sip: our eyes close, we unwittingly sigh in unison, we look across the table at each other, recognizing a kindred spirit, our eyes lock, voluble Narcis is rendered speechless, stuttering, he grabs my hand, I stroke his arm, suddenly we’re kissing passionately. But wait! My daughter is coming home from her weekend away in half an hour! I have to be there! The passion is severed, it’s postponed, it hurts, it kills, it’s fabulously excruciating, and it has to wait until next week.

That week comes. Narcis takes me to a famous, classic Catalan restaurant in the old quarter of Barcelona, but first we stop into his favorite wine cellar and examine the cavas, sharing knowledge, sniffing out each other’s credentials, impressing each other in a cava-tinged mating dance. In short: making sure the other really is legit in their professed cava passion. This is important. As Narcis has declared, “Anyone who loves cava is a good person.” I couldn’t agree more. Then a romantic dinner, a bottle of cava… and the rest is history. Unforgettable! Another night, he has earned it: we split an ice-cold bottle of my Privat. Sheer ecstasy. I have waited my whole life for this.

Narcis didn’t last long, as the nuttiness soon revealed itself, but he and our mutual cava crush were without a doubt the ideal way to usher me back into life and love. And we’re still friends and still discuss – and occasionally share – a bottle of cava, but only the cava now.

Then came Joan. Poor Joan. Joan is a man’s name in Catalan, by the way. Like Juan in Spanish. Tall, almost stooped Joan. Molt català, en Joan. Damaged goods. Weighted down by the sorrows of his life, half-real, half-imagined. Heart of gold, sharp mind, serious, political, opinionated. Also chronically depressed. And he brings down everyone around him, unawares because he’d never hurt a flea. A cava lover, of course. I’m never passionate about Joan, but it works for a while. He comes to my house, cooks dinner to court me with his tender loving care, treats me like a princess on her pedestal, slaves in the kitchen as I work, bringing me up a glass of cava to take the edge off my toil, and refills – with kisses – when necessary. Joan wasn’t what I was looking for, and I did let him go, but I like to think that we shared some fond moments – and some good bottles of cava.

And then came Enrique. Ah, Enrique! Charming, witty, outrageous, passionate, adventurous, lying Enrique. Of course, I didn’t learn about the lying part until it would break my heart. But first the good part. Our first date. Enrique takes me to an out-of-the-way tapas joint in his city. Delicious, showing me off to his friends, the owners (or probably getting the thumbs up or thumbs down, since I was likely not the first… or last, he brought there), a wonderful bottle of cava to help things slide down, to grease the wheels of conversation between virtual strangers. Enrique knows his cava and lets me know that. He likes the fact that I love cava – both his ex-wives did, too. Is that a good thing?

Dinner is over, but we’re not and the night is certainly not. It’s a weeknight, though, and most places are closed at this hour. So we go to an Irish pub and share a beer. That’s fine but… it isn’t quite hitting the festive note we’re both wanting to match the very intense buzz of sparks flying between us. So we get into our cars, drive up Tibidabo, the mountain at the back of Barcelona opposite the sea, and go to Mirablau, required for a first date, a bar with a wall of windows perched over Barcelona at night, the ships out at sea lit up in the distance. After years, it’s still breathtaking. I had first been here with my ex-husband as another courting ploy… but that was a lifetime ago. Enrique orders us another bottle of cava. We sit across from each other at a tiny table. The mating signs are palpable: we are charming, witty, full of laughter, flirty… eye contact galore, I toss my hair, smile, glow, pupils dilated, no doubt, and when the cava is uncorked and poured we express mutual delight. Enrique cups my face in his hands in a tender gesture, and I reach out and kiss him, not tenderly. And we kiss, and we kiss, and we kiss… And we actually abandon that bottle of cava to consummate the passion. A first, that, but oh-so-worth it. It was clear there would be many more bottles of cava strewn along our pathway.

I fall head over heels with Enrique. We travel, we eat in exquisite restaurants, we stay up all night long. He comes to my house once a week after work. That means 10 pm. I have prepared a salad of mesclun, candied onions, goat cheese broiled with bubbling brown sugar, honey vinaigrette, or perhaps tuna tataki with sesame seeds and ginger sauce on a bed of frisé lettuce, or perhaps wild mushroom risotto with a balsamic vinegar reduction, and sometimes just smoked salmon with capers, onions, and dill, and, of course, a bottle of Privat which goes from fridge to freezer as soon as he texts me he’s on his way. Summer or winter, we’re on my balcony to have dinner – Enrique’s a smoker, and I love him, but not his smoke. In the summer, we may be unclothed or in dishabille, bottle of cava sweating in the ice bucket. In the winter, we wrap a blanket around ourselves and talk, talk, talk, revealing all our innermost experiences, thoughts, and feelings. And always, the glass of cava nearby. Bond, merge, repeat.

Turns out Enrique’s house was off-limits not because his son lived there and it was a messy bachelor’s pad, but because his steady partner lived there. She was the wifey; I was the ‘other woman’. She ironed his clothes and washed his dishes; I gave him passion, fun, thrills, cava. I was devastated, broken-hearted. The man of my life, my soul mate, my fellow cava lover was a cad, a heel, a bounder, a scoundrel. To me and to her.

My love life went underground temporarily, but to compensate my friends and I started having cava tastings. It was some consolation; cava to mend my heart a second time. Cava, I had learned, cannot be drunk alone, the way I did in my Sex-and-the-City-recovering-from-a-divorce phase. No, it must be drunk in company with convivial fellowship, goodwill, and pure, hedonistic pleasure. And it must be drunk in a proper cava glass with people who know how to appreciate it. I have beautiful, thick, cut-crystal Waterford champagne flutes that my mother gave me. Won’t work; they’re too thick. It must be a thin, thin glass, always a flute, so the bubbles have a nice, long, winding journey on their way up to the annunciatory ping. And the cava must be ice-cold. If you really want your cava to chill, the bucket should contain half-ice and half-water, my Catalan friends taught me. And they know. It’s in their blood.

Now in the U.S., I long for my cava. I ache for my balcony. I yearn for fellow cava travelling companions, those true soul mates whose eyes just light up at the thought – not to mention the cork pop (to this day, pop a cork and I gasp with delight, while my daughter’s eyes go searching) – of cava, and I mean proper cava, the good stuff, my beloved Privat, which goes down sharp as a knife and whets my very soul.