A Garden
Planted for
the Soul

The story of Naveran begins with a departure. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a young man named Pablo left Catalonia with little more than ambition, joining thousands of his countrymen who scattered across the Americas in search of fortune — some to Cuba, some to Chile, some to Argentina. Not all of them succeeded. Many returned empty-handed. Pablo was not among those.

He came back wealthy, and his return was unmistakable. The so-called Americanos — Catalans who had made their fortunes in the New World — were easy to spot: white suits, Panama hats, and a taste for grand gestures. Pablo married the daughter of the Marquis of Naveran, acquired an estate he had known since childhood, and in 1889 carried out what his descendants still describe as the largest single planting the area had ever witnessed.

The choice of Parellada as the dominant variety gave the house its familiar name — Can Parellada, the house of the Parellada family. But the spirit of the planting owed as much to aesthetics as agronomy. Pablo was captivated by Modernisme, the Catalan expression of Art Nouveau sweeping through Barcelona’s drawing rooms and building sites, and he brought that sensibility to the countryside. Vineyards did not simply have to produce; they had to be beautiful. The house of the cypresses was planted as a statement of civilisation.

It was also, historically, the moment when Cava came into being as a distinct tradition — bubbles were a novelty, daring, a symbol of creative optimism — and Naveran embraced that momentum from the start.

Geography shapes everything at Naveran. The estate sits in the northernmost and most elevated sector of the Penedès, facing the mass of Montserrat directly to the north — a position that sets it apart climatically from both the coastal warmth of the Costa del Garraf and the sun-scorched central plains. Average temperatures hover around 14°C. Annual rainfall reaches roughly 600 mm: not abundant, but significantly more than the 300 to 400 mm recorded on the other side of the mountain.

What makes the estate genuinely complex, however, is not simply its altitude but the way that terrain fragments into three distinct soil profiles, each contributing a different dimension to the final blends.

The tripartite structure is not merely a curiosity — it is a winemaking tool. The vintage collection Cavas are explicitly assembled to leverage the contrast: if freshness is lacking, grapes from the valley floors are weighted more heavily; if tension and length are needed, the hill vineyards provide the counterpoint. Single-vineyard expressions, by contrast, surrender that flexibility in exchange for purity of character.

To understand what Naveran is becoming, one must first understand what its three core varieties can and cannot do — and why the incoming team’s conviction falls, resolutely, on one of them above all.

The comparison to Chardonnay illuminates something important about the current transition. Michel, the previous owner — Swiss by origin, formed by Champagne references — favoured precisely that: a profile oriented toward freshness, international character, and Chardonnay’s particular elegance. Under his stewardship Naveran never adopted formal aging classifications, releasing wines at 18 to 24 months and positioning them in the younger, more accessible tier of the Cava spectrum.

The Rocqueta family’s arrival represents an inversion of that premise. Their track record in other appellations — recovering the first-ever 100% Picapoll, the first-ever 100% Mandó — signals an appetite for indigenous identity above internationalism. At Naveran, the question they asked first upon arrival was not “what can we make?” but “which are the best spots for Xarel·lo and Sumoll?” The local variety as compass point, not concession.

The current range at Naveran exists in a transitional state — partly a reflection of Michel’s legacy, partly the first articulations of the new direction. Understanding both helps locate where the estate is headed.

The vineyard tells the story of the last decade bluntly. Four consecutive years of severe drought — conditions extreme enough not to reduce yields but to kill vines outright — cost Naveran 20 hectares of plantings, primarily younger blocks. The affected land now rests in guaret, fallow for a minimum of three years before replanting can begin.

The experience clarified several convictions that the new ownership has since adopted as doctrine.

First: the superiority of old vines in extremis. The ancient bush-trained vines — those planted in the traditional Goblet or en vas system — weathered the drought with dramatically greater resilience than the trellised younger plantings. Their deep root systems, their reduced canopy exposure, their decades of adaptation to this specific ground, made the difference between survival and death.

The response is threefold. New plantings will default to bush vine (Goblet) training, reducing direct sun exposure on fruit and improving drought tolerance. Replanted land will prioritise Xarel·lo and Sumoll — the varieties judged most heat and drought resistant. And irrigation remains off-limits under the estate’s organic certification except as an absolute emergency measure, maintaining the agricultural philosophy that makes their Cava Guarda Superior status possible.

The climate irony is sharp: the same warming that is prompting growers across Europe to undertake leaf-removal to improve ripeness now has the team at Naveran discussing the reverse — how to shade the fruit, how to simulate the umbrella that the old vineyards’ foliage once provided naturally. The leaf-pruning of a generation ago has become the cautionary tale of today.

The Rocqueta family arrives at Naveran carrying eight centuries of documented winemaking continuity — including the experience of total loss. Their family records note 1883 as the year Phylloxera reached their vineyards and obliterated everything: the presses, the stocks, the plantings. That memory is institutional. It explains why no ungrafted vineyard exists on any of their properties, and why the choice of rootstock is never regarded as a mere technical decision.

The vision for Naveran is stated with unusual clarity. Three pillars: longer aging, lower dosage, indigenous varieties. The Cavas of the future will carry extended en rima time in the estate’s galleries, pushing well past the 18 to 24 month releases of the Michel era. The dosage ceiling is 7 g/l; anything above is described, without ambivalence, as counterproductive to what this land actually offers.

And the varieties: Xarel·lo, increasingly, as the primary voice. Sumoll returning to the hillsides where drought tolerance matters most. And somewhere, eventually, the recovery of forgotten local material — a tradition the family has already demonstrated at their Abadal estate with Picapoll and Mandó — applied now to the specific genetic heritage of this corner of the Penedès.

Standing among the cypress trees — planted 135 years ago as much for beauty as for boundary — it is easy to understand why this estate was worth fighting to preserve. The house of the cypresses was always about more than Cava. It was about the idea that the act of cultivating a place, with care and conviction across generations, produces something that no individual lifetime can fully account for. Pablo planted a garden. Michel tended it through the century. The Rocqueta family are now, with remarkable deliberateness, deciding what it will say next.