Catalan winemaking tradition I. From antiquity to the Middle Ages

Catalonia, country of wines: a journey of 2,700 years

It may seem cliché to insist that Catalonia is a country of wines, but other wine-producing countries, with a tradition that goes back in the best cases to a few centuries, such as Argentina, Australia, California or South Africa, envy this past that gives our wines a prestige and a cultural and gastronomic roots that their own do not have.

We know that the cultivation of vines and the production and trade of wine in the lands of present-day Catalonia have more than 2,700 years of history, although there are still two hypotheses about its introduction, always linked to the contacts between the indigenous population and foreign peoples, Greeks and Phoenicians.

One of the hypotheses proposes that the introducers are the Phocaean Greeks, who arrived by north of the Iberian Peninsula, from theirs colonies of Massàlia (Marseille) and Empúries; the other that are the Phoenicians, from theirs factories in the south of the peninsula, who founded the city ofEbussus (Eivissa), through which Phoenician trade spread throughout the territory of present-day Catalonia. Between the second half of the 7th century BC and the first quarter of the 6th century BC, one is detected regular and continuous presence of Phoenician materials in different towns and indigenous necropolises both in the north and in the south of the mouth of the Ebro, and the finding of grape seeds in the deposits of the Turó de la Font de la Canya (Avinyonet del Penedès, Alt Penedès) and Sant Jaume/Mas d’en Serra (Alcanar, Montsià) it seems to favor the hypothesis of introduction from the south, because the context in which these seeds have appeared is clearly of Phoenician influence.

Be that as it may, this remote past serves on the one hand to illustrate the excellent acclimatization of the vine in our territory, and on the other, to explain the rooting of wine culture in Catalonia, given that it even predates Romanization, a precursor to the current identity based on the Catalan language.

Cultivation and consumption spread with Romanization and continued in Visigoth and also Muslim times. It could not be otherwise, because an impossible to appreciate part of the inhabitants of al-Andalus were descendants of Hispanogoths and continuers, at least partially, of their agricultural traditions.

during theMiddle Age, the continuity of viticulture and winemaking remained in hands of the nobility and the great institutions of the Church, who needed the wine to celebrate mass. Thus, the exploitation of resources was organized from top to bottom: the count granted land to his faithful and to religious houses as a form of remuneration for services and loyalties; these subordinates distributed land to their subordinates in exchange for rents, military services or simple loyalty, and these did the same downwards until they reached the wine-growing farmer.