Trepat

Trepat is a Catalan red grown almost entirely in the Conca de Barberà, a cool inland appellation in the hills west of Tarragona, and its principal role has been to make rosé Cava. It is unusually well suited to the job: thin-skinned and pale, with low colour extraction, high acidity and a delicate strawberry-and-rose-hip perfume that survives the second fermentation intact.

The pale colour that makes it valuable for rosé is a liability for red wine, and for a long time it was assumed Trepat could not make one worth drinking. That assumption has been quietly dismantled. A generation of producers in the Conca began treating it like Pinot Noir — whole-bunch fermentation, gentle extraction, large old wood rather than new barrels — and produced light, fragrant, genuinely elegant reds with red-fruit aromatics, fine tannin and real freshness.

The comparison to Pinot Noir gets made often. It is fair up to a point: both are pale, perfumed, high in acid and easily overwhelmed by heavy-handed winemaking. Trepat is more overtly floral and less earthy, and it does not have the same capacity to age.

It ripens late, which in a warm region is an advantage, and it keeps its acidity even in hot vintages. Plantings are small and largely confined to the Conca de Barberà, where the grape is treated as the local speciality and where almost all of the interesting examples originate. Outside Catalonia it is essentially unknown.