A town of the Alt Empordà (Girona) with a castle-palace of the Rocabertí family and a walled medieval core. In the early Middle Ages it was the head of the pagus or county of Peralada, dependent on Empúries; from 1078 it had its own viscounts.
medieval tradition (Carmelite convent, land granted 1293, 14th-century building); purchase of the castle 1923; ‘Spanish Champagne’ lawsuit 1960The Carmelites’ bodega and ‘Spanish champagne’
In Peralada they say that the castle’s wine was born in the Middle Ages, in the cellar of the convent of El Carmen, built from the 14th century onwards on land the viscounts granted to the Carmelite friars in 1293; tradition holds that the friars made wine there until the disentailment expelled them in 1835. In 1923 the businessman Miquel Mateu bought the castle and from 1929 revived the bodega to make the house wine once again. Its rosé sparkling wine was a success in the United Kingdom, and in 1960 an English court ruled in favour of the Champagne producers against the Costa Brava Wine Co., which was selling it as ‘Spanish Champagne’. That defeat, which forced the search for another name, is remembered as one of the origins of the word cava.
Alive today: Peralada lies at the heart of the DO Empordà, whose Regulatory Council is based in neighbouring Figueres. The Perelada bodega still makes DO Empordà wines and cava, and the old medieval cellar of the convent of El Carmen now houses the Wine Museum within the castle’s museum complex, which also hosts the Castell de Peralada Festival every summer.