Recaredo

Third generation at the cellar mouth

The bottles finish by hand: disgorgement at the cellar, natural cork in the aging, estate grapes kept inside the house. Ton Mata, winemaker at Recaredo in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, carries that discipline as the third generation of the family. His work here sits across more than the technical bench. He is CEO of Recaredo, president of Corpinnat, and the person holding a line between a family cellar and a regional standard that asks more of its members than convenience would allow.

Mata's route into that responsibility passed through the Navarre Viticulture and Oenology Station, Veuve Clicquot, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and EADA. At Recaredo, he first worked in technical management of the estate from 2000 to 2010, the decade where cellar rhythm, aging oversight, and the steadiness of a house method are learned close to the tools. From 2010 to 2019 he was managing director. Since 2019, he has led as CEO, with the same vocabulary returning to the work: rigour, authenticity, transparency, patience. In his own words on Corpinnat, “we can put more strict rules into place than an appellation can.”

Estate fruit, cork, and no sugar addition

Recaredo works within Corpinnat, with a biodynamic philosophy and a small scale that keeps the cellar tied to the vineyard rather than to purchased volume. The house makes sparkling wines from estate-grown grapes, among them Xarel·lo, Macabeu, Parellada, Monastrell, and Garnacha, on dry-farmed, organic and biodynamic ground. The setting is Penedès, on calcareous soils with Montserrat Mountain in view, and that landscape is not treated as backdrop. It sets the frame for how the fruit enters the cellar and how long the method is allowed to hold.

The technical signature is plain and demanding: native yeast cultivation, bottle fermentation without sugar addition, secondary fermentation under cork, natural cork aging, and manual disgorgement. Those choices make patience a physical part of the wine. They also make transparency harder to fake, because the method leaves fewer places to hide adjustment. Mata's signature wines, Homenatge a Josep Mata Capellades and Recaredo L’Infinit, sit inside that same program rather than apart from it.

The quiet of the family cellars

The cellar at Recaredo is quiet in the way working rooms become quiet when every movement has a purpose. The tasting room and cave tasting draw the visitor toward the method, not away from it: bottle, cork, lees, hand, time. In the historic family cellars, the atmosphere is intimate and restrained, with the serenity of a house that has not mistaken volume for authority.

The place itself keeps the wine close to its origin. Estate fruit, calcareous soil, biodynamic farming, and the Corpinnat discipline meet in the same sequence of gestures, from vineyard to disgorgement. The close work remains in the hands, and the final image is not a view or a label, but Ton Mata's line of bottles moving through manual disgorgement at Recaredo.