As the present-day steward of his family’s pioneering Recaredo estate, third-generation Ton Mata oversees a formidable operation: 100 hectares of biodynamically farmed vineyards in Catalunya’s Alt Penedès, with a team of over 50 full-time employees, and a jaw-dropping subterranean cellar housing over a million bottles awaiting eventual disgorgement (by hand, of course). Ton leads Recaredo with an ethical rigor which encompasses not only the estate’s fastidious approach to viticulture, fermentation, and aging, but also the company culture itself; Ton’s team—many of whom have significant tenure—operate in an environment of respect, trust, and support which is palpable even during a brief visit to the winery.
While Recaredo is small in scale compared to the gargantuan wineries that dominate the region, Ton Mata and his longtime partner Encarna Castillo—together since 1998 when they met as interns in Champagne—yearned to produce sparkling wine on a truly artisanal scale, using the same technology (or lack thereof) with which Ton’s grandfather began Recaredo in 1924. In the late 2000s, Ton and Encarna purchased a modest 19th century house in the residential neighborhood of Can Rossell de la Serra, just 5 kilometers from Recaredo’s village of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, aiming to use its pre-existing cellar as space in which to realize their dream of producing a truly homemade sparkling wine.
Christening their project Bufadors, Ton and Encarna were committed from the outset to using only endogenous materials. To that end, everything in their wines comes only from the grapes themselves, with secondary fermentations prompted by still-fermenting grape must; the wines receive no added sulfur dioxide, and no methods of clarification are employed. This degree of non-interventionism—all but unheard-of in the Alt Penedès—results in sparkling wines of startling immediacy, with electrifying, palate-staining minerality, evocatively pulpy textures, and ultra-vivid fruit. Recaredo’s labor-intensive rigor informs the production of Bufadors, as Ton and Encarna allow their wines many years of lees aging before being manually disgorged without freezing.
