Visit Spain and make your way a bit outside of Barcelona for a few bubbly days in Codorniu.
Here good wine is a matter of course after a day on the golf course.

Close to Barcelona, a city of three million inhabitants, is the Penedés area, where 200 million bottles of cava are produced by 271 companies, ranging from small local producers to large but equally local giants such as Freixenet and Codorniu. The golf course with the same name as the wine is partly owned by Codorniu and is called Masia Bach.
We begin there one afternoon.

Entrepreneur Jorge, or George as he in “Spanglish” suggested we say, wants to offer a glass of wine. We have spent a few hours in the same four ball and as the other two only spoke Spanish, he took on the hospitality role as my host. In five hours you get to know each other and now that I know everything about him and his family he wants to offer me a glass of wine... or two.

A waiter arrives with the bottle and places it on the table at the golf club's open-air restaurant and I half look at the label. A grand house in the neoclassical style adorns it. I recognise the label from a 40-year’s celebration dinner the previous year. Then you lift your eyes, letting them cross the deep green fairways of the tenth hole and see a beautiful house, also grand in neo-classical style, beyond the tenth hole.

We toast to José María Olazábal, the world golfer who designed this quite spectacular course that among other things, lures with play over a ravine and has a number of tee-shots, including the twelth, where you hit directly towards Montserrat in the burning afternoon sun.

A bit tired after eighteen holes in the sun you close your eyes and the red wine teases your taste buds before it flows down, and then and only then, you realize that it is the same house on the label that you see from the golf club’s bar. We’re drinking Masia Bach at Masia Bach. There is a special feeling, an exceedingly nice feeling.

With due deference to red wine, in Penedés you drink cava. People in the area drink it with everything and it’s only in export that you see peaks around school closings, Christmas and New Year's. The drink is now officially called cava since a few courts made it so in 1986 although many still say champagne, Spanish champagne, about the drink that is made in the same way and often of the same grape as its French cousin.
The chardonnay grape, considered by many as the best, was once not permitted to be used in Spanish cava. The traditional macabeo, parellada and xarello should be used. Codorniu took on this battle, and today the best selling cava, for example, is Anna de Codorniu, made of 85 percent chardonnay grapes. Grape growers therefore get financial help and advice from Codorniu to replant chardonnay grapes. Anna de Codorniu incidentally is only sold in the domestic market - and in Sweden, where it has crowned thousands and thousands of student dinners and weddings.

Many who go to the Barcelona area on a golf trip choose golf hotels and golf courses along the coast, north of the city. In and of itself a good choice, but a more unusual and perhaps more exciting option as a travel experience is undoubtedly combining golf with cava, and then you should stay in Penedès, or at Masia Bach.

If that doesn’t strike your fancy you can otherwise just as well stay at a hotel, like the three star Hotel Sol i Vi with the region’s best restaurant, or in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, a larger village that would like to be a small town and calls itself the capital of cava. Or better still at El Trapiche, among the grapevines in the middle of nowhere.

There is a farm that, having been abandoned and fallen into disrepair for forty years, was bought by an Argentinean family who restored and created a hotel...wrong, a boarding house...wrong, a hostel...wrong ... rather a very special type of accommodation for tourists. There are only three rooms: the blue, the pink and yellow.
Wooden beams, stunning views and a farm breakfast are included and just say to the owners or their children and they fix lunch and dinner in the dining room or outside at the grill. The guestbook testifies that they do it well also. It is close to several golf courses, including Masia Bach, and a great place to start from if you want to visit cava producers. Something you definitely should do. It’s an extraordinary experience. Knowledgeable and dedicated people explain why their cava is the best and tasting is a matter of course. As well as the snacks in the form of sausages, ham and cheese that alone are worth the trip ...

Text: Ola Liljedahl and Lena Nyblad-Liljedahl
Photo: Fernando Marcial
Web Editor: Emma Lindén.