The Penedès is wine country in the fullest sense, and Vilafranca is its market town and capital. The surrounding plain, hemmed by low hills, produces still reds and whites under the Penedès denomination, while the cava cellars of the same region turn out sparkling wine a short drive away. The local table follows the vine. The signature dish is xató, a robust winter salad of escarole, salt cod, tuna, anchovies and black olives, bound by a pounded sauce of chillies, toasted almonds and garlic, and washed down with the region's black wine. For dessert there are catànies, almonds smothered in chocolate, and coca garlanda, a ring-shaped sweet bread. Little of the local identity strays far from the grape.

At the heart of the old town, near the Plaça de Jaume I, stands the Basilica of Santa Maria. Begun at the close of the thirteenth century on the footprint of an older Romanesque chapel, it holds a quiet distinction: it was the first parish church in Catalonia built in the Gothic style. Its architects followed the pattern that would come to define Catalan Gothic, a single wide nave of five bays, roofed with ribbed vaults and flanked by chapels tucked between unusually thick buttresses. The main facade, started in the fifteenth century, has been reworked more than once, most recently at the start of the twentieth. Today visitors can climb the bell tower, and the church times some ascents to catch the sunset spreading over the vineyards below.

Vilafranca kept its medieval bones. Within the line of the old walls, Gothic manor houses still front the narrow streets, each with the same essential plan: a central courtyard as the hub of the house, a covered staircase, and a gallery of pointed arches above. Palau Baltà, first built in 1308 and restored in 1889 by the local architect August Font, is a fine example. Cal Gomà, from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, was the manor house of Bishop Josep Torras i Bages and stands close to where the town's Jewish quarter once lay; it now shelters a municipal library that bears his name. Nearby, only the sober cloister survives of the Franciscan convent of Sant Francesc, a late-thirteenth-century building that became a burial place for the nobility of the Penedès. Almost as old is the Chapel of Sant Joan, raised in the early fourteenth century by the military order of the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, its robust Gothic walls softened by lingering Romanesque touches. Later centuries left their own marks too, among them the Church of the Trinity of 1578, a rare local example of the moment when Gothic gave way to the Renaissance.

Wine wealth also bought the town a coat of modernist finery. The Casa de la Vila, the town hall, is medieval at its core, but its facade was remade in 1912 with asymmetrical floral ornament, wrought-iron balconies and a clock framed in garlands of carved fruit. The taste for the ornate followed residents into the afterlife. Vilafranca's cemetery, opened in 1839 on the grounds of a former Capuchin convent, is filled with neo-Gothic and modernist family pantheons designed by architects such as Santiago Güell and August Font. Among those buried here are the writer and philosopher Eugeni d'Ors and the scholar Manuel Milà i Fontanals. The cemetery is a member of the European Association of Significant Cemeteries, and guided tours lead visitors through its funerary architecture.