Can you imagine spending 45 million euros to renovate a winery and nobody seeing the façade? can you imagine seduce an American president with a Catalan cava that could open the doors of the White House?
Can you imagine having the largest glass museum in Spain with more than 2,500 pieces, including some from Pharaonic Egypt? Can you imagine also having a French-style garden that hides a 9th century castle behind its trees?
Well, stop imagining why it exists and is called Castell Perelada, which at outskirts of this small medieval town del Alt Empordà is home to one of the largest wineries in the DO Ampurdán and which, in addition, if imagination were lacking, also adds a restaurant with a Michelin star.
And all began in the year 1923when the Mateu family bought the castle and convent located on this estate from the counts of Perelada where, later on, they realized that wine had been the engine of growth for centuries and now puts wine on the world map. a town of barely 2,000 inhabitants.
Of monks, nobles and trouble with the State
Capital of the county of Perelada since the Middle Ages, the owners and lords of this territory were the Counts of Perelada themselves, who at the beginning of the 19th century they headed to paris to be ambassadors of Spain in France in the figure of Antonio María Dameto and Crespi de Valldaura. Church and nobility coincided again, since already in the 13th century the counts admitted a small monastic delegation in their territories, which would inhabit the Monastery of Santo Domingo.
It would already be in the 16th century when the Dominican monks (after the extinction of the Augustinians) shared this space that the counts had ceded to them until well into the 19th century. With the counts out of the picture, the monks they manage the convent and also part of the castle.
However, in 1835 the monks abandoned the convent after the Confiscation of Mendizábal, which forced disaffect ecclesiastical property to sustain public coffers. The monks left and the counts, still in Paris —although no longer holding public office— did not return to Perelada until the end of the century.
There they find themselves with the confiscation of the entire territory at public hands, having to prove that both the convent and the castle were their property. After various disputes, the counts of Perelada win and recondition the estate, converting the gardens in a small Versailles and restoring that old Empordà castle where they expanded the library, today a fund with more than 80,000 volumes, including more than 2,000 incunabula.
New hands, winery and museum
It is in the year 1923, with the Counts in a certain economic decline, when the Mateu family appears, founders of what we know today as Castell Perelada. It is the time of Damià Mateu, iron and motor industryand his son Miguel, the visible head that turns that castle —with just 24 years old— into a center of collecting and art.
Glass, tapestries, ceramics, sacred paintings and the growing library thus become the cultural epicenter of a Castle through which personalities as diverse as the American president Dwight Eisenhower (in love with the Gran Claustro cava), the artist Salvador Dalí or the dictator Francisco Franco, a personal friend of Miguel Mateu, would pass through. .
It is Michael who revives the convent winery, beginning to make wine in it as it had been done traditionally until he realized the future that those Empordà wines had. In between, all the cultural and architectural legacy of the castle and museum.
The library, the cloister or the Museum itself, fully visitable, is combined with the wine tourism activity that places wine as the epicenter of a centenary in which nothing has been spared.
A 21st century winery that cannot be seen, but can be felt
“Are you telling me that we are going to build a warehouse where the facade is not going to be seen?” were the words of Arturo Suqué, Miguel Mateu’s son-in-law and Carmen Mateu’s husband, to his son Javier Suqué when he told him, already in 2003, the intention that the new winery did not have a visible façade.
They contacted a local architecture studio, from the nearby town of Olot, called RCR, led by three young architects who were no more than thirty. Almost 20 years later and with several design changes, the winery finally saw the light of day.
In between, sustainability, ecology and the conviction to make the best possible wines. At his side, the RCR label, which in 2017 would win the Pritzker Architecture Prize (what we could consider a kind of Nobel Prize), which further reinforces the commitment of a winery that has become a wine tourism benchmark with the capacity to receive 30,000 visitors a year.
Along with this, to continue mastering the arts, the Perelada Castle Festival, promoted by Carmen Mateu and turned into another of the cultural bastions of the area. Artists of the stature of the soprana Montserrat Caballé, the tenor José Carreras or the dancer Rudolf Nureyev attended this summer festival dedicated to the performing arts.
Michelin star
Under the baton of today disappeared Xavier SagristaCastell Perelada also reached Michelin heaven in 2018. An award that was created with four hands, the work of the sommelier and head waiter being essential toni gerezstill at the foot of the canyon in Castell Perelada.
Oblivious to any kind of dissonance, the large hall of the gastronomic restaurant —cloistered within the castle itself—, the kitchen proposal today is the responsibility of chef Javier Martínez, who forged himself for a decade and a half with Sagristà.
Empordà and Catalan stamp, also making didactics about winethis kitchen that also has two Repsol suns is the best embassy of the DO Empordà, and that puts a town of barely 2,000 inhabitants on the Michelin map.
Today as more than 1,000 years agothe Castle of Perelada continues to be the most gastronomic and oenological epicenter of Empordà and, in turn, the dream of the Mateu family to turn that historic refuge into the region’s magnet.
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