Right now in the store we have my favorite pétillant naturels, or pet nats. Pet nats are sparkling wines made in a method that differs from many others. In addition to the wealth of riches in store, I also found myself reflecting on pet nat because I tried to make one recently. I did not succeed.
To make pet nat, you bottle juice while it is still fermenting, when there is still sugar in the wine. I bought fruit from Michigan, the Chamborcin grape, a red grape. I crushed the grapes with my feet. I let the juice sit on the skins for two nights then pressed. Overnight, I had juice fermenting away in my glass demijohn. The weather was cool, but the fermentation was very active. I tasted the wine every other day (Not often enough I’m sure). It was very sweet at first. It was becoming less sweet quickly. The time to bottle was coming. I tasted it on a Saturday and thought it was time. I’ve never done this before, never seen it done before, had no measurements as to what the potential alcohol of the fruit, no microscope to view yeast through. Still, I thought the wine would be better as a sparkling wine, so I wanted to give it a try. I really thought it might work. I was scared of bottling the wine too sweet because - 1 - what if the fermentation slowed as the weather was cooling, and it didn’t finish eating the sugar, and I had a sweet wine that could start fermenting again when the weather was warm, or maybe not, I wouldn’t really know. And 2 - it might explode from too much pressure if the fermentation was too active in the bottle from too much sugar food to feast on. I tasted it on a Saturday and thought, this should be bottled. The earliest I could do it was Sunday. A month later I opened a bottle, at our sale on Sunday. It was a still wine. I am crestfallen.
Making sparkling wine is difficult. Winemaking is about decisions, and in making bubbly wine, there is even more to decide. Making good natural wine is also very hard. Making good, sparkling, natural wine is, not surprisingly, very challenging. There’s something sort of paradoxical that pet nat is considered an informal wine but to make a good wine requires a high level of craft.
My understanding of the history of the method is as follows. Many hundreds of years ago, before Champagne made sparkling wines, in Gaillac and in Limoux in southern France, people made pet nats, but didn’t call them that. They were called Methode Gaillacoise, at least in Gaillac, and made with regional grape varieties only, like Mauzac aka Blanquette. Jumping forward right til the 1990s in the Loire Valley, Christian Chaussard started experimenting with sparkling wine ferments and what we now call pet nat as a modern phenomenon began. Chaussard’s pals like Thierry Puzelat and many others in their community started making them too, and they became known as wines for friends, by friends. More friends and neighbors started making them in the Loire. They found a huge audience in wine bars in France and abroad. In the US, pet nat became the wine perhaps most optically associated with natural wine. It seems to be the first natural wine many people remember tasting and enjoying.
It is perhaps because of this history that I tend to explain petillant naturel aka pet nat aka in how it differs from champagne aka the traditional method. Pet Nat has undergone one fermentation. Champagne has undergone two fermentations. But the implications of this difference are not self-evident - most significantly that the Champagne method offers more control to its maker than pet nat. In the champagne method, you can choose the amount of yeast and sugar you apply to make the wine sparkle - this is not the case with pet nat.
The first fermentation is the alcoholic fermentation, when yeast eats sugar and turns into alcohol. Carbon dioxide occurs as a result of fermentation. Eventually, the carbon dioxide will subside, and you have a still wine, which has very little or no remaining sugar, nothing left for yeast to eat (this is how it goes ideally, sometimes things happen differently). The fermentation is complete.
Using the Champagne method, you take this still wine, and add sugar and yeast in order to start a second fermentation in the bottle. You let these bottles rest for a period of time, usually a few months, could be years, and collect yeast in their necks. You flash freeze the tops of the bottles, in a process called disgorgement, in which you remove the yeast and top the wine with a champagne cork and cage closure. Often you also add sugar before corking it again, to sweeten the champagne. This is called dosage.
The Champagne method takes time, storage space and equipment. But pet nat also requires a winemaker who, typically otherwise makes still wine, to source, buy and store different bottles and closures, ones that can handle higher pressure than still bottles and corks. You need a crown capper and you need extra space. Another challenge is timing. If you don’t just make pet nat (most people don’t) then you are bottling a sensitive wine in the middle harvesting and processing lots of other fruit into juice, your absolute busiest time of year. I think that it also takes a happy cellar to make a good pet nat, as much or more than to make a good still wine. Winemakers that are able to cultivate a balance of bacteria and yeasts in their winemaking environment may have more steady fermentations.
You kind of have to see into the future when making pet nat, to make an educated estimation of where the wine will be after it has been under closure for several months. It is in the bottle, sealed, and there’s no more tinkering you can do to it. The finality seems intimidating - at least it was for me with my pet nat effort. Winemakers must be intimately familiar with their craft to succeed.
It’s easy to see why the wines are so compelling and why they are an entry point for others. Many of us love bubbles. Many people are more familiar with beer than with wine in the US, and pet nat reminds us of some beer like lambic sometimes. Pet nats are often lower or moderate in alcohol because winemakers often pick the fruit for pet nat first, the fruit doesn’t need or isn’t wanted to be as ripe as for still wines.
What makes those we have in stock from Jean Pierre Robinot, Pascal Potaire of Les Capriades and Bruno Duchene so special to me is that they offer complexity that only bubbles bring out. You can’t separate the sense of the still wine from the bubbliness, it is a complete expression. The wine has been crafted very thoughtfully, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With certain sparkling wines, like Champagne, I’d usually rather drink them without the starchy stiff bubbles. I have been known to decant Champagne because of this. The texture of the bubbles of these pet nats varies, although in general I find them pleasant, not piercing.
All of the wines made by Pascal Potaire at Les Capriades are petillant naturels, and all are disgorged. A winemaker can disgorge a pet nat just as one would a Champagne. This approach is said to limit the variation between bottles - removing the yeast guarantees a more stable wine. To me it is just one of the aspects of the house style of Les Capriades that is focused on vertical energy and electric lift. It is said that acidity is a texture as much as it is a flavor - the layering of the bright acidity of the local Loire grapes like Chenin Blanc and Gamay that Les Capriades sources, combined with the ping of their fine bubbles is a rollercoaster for the palette. La Bulle Rouge, the wine we have in stock, is a red wine that has been fruity sweet with lots of acidity in past vintages. This vintage is more dry, a little less intense contrast than the previous vintages, which is also nice, to have a little less drama.
My friend the wine importer Zev Rovine has said if he had to pick one producer to drink for the rest of his life, it would be Jean Pierre Robinot - this is because Robinot makes phenomenal sparkling wines, stunning still white wines from Chenin Blanc, some are sweeter and some are drier, and several different red wine cuvees that, while all from the same grape variety (Pineau d’aunis) have discrete identities. You have many methods and styles of winemaking represented at one small winery. Les Années Folles, the petillant we have available, is always a rose though not always made entirely from Pineau d’aunis. Only in years when Jean Pierre has enough red fruit does it not also include some Chenin Blanc. These all-Pineau bottlings speak to me, the crunchy and sharp salt and black pepper spice of the variety pops along with the crackling bubbles.
There is then Bruno Duchene’s pet nat called Suzette. I love Grenache Blanc, the variety here, but this is less a varietal wine than the Robinot to me, also maybe because Bruno makes a still Grenache Blanc that tastes like salt and bananas and melts my heart. Suzette also tastes a little like salt and bananas but the bubbles bring a softness to the wine, seemingly the opposite effect from the Loire Valley examples. You feel you are in a wildflower meadow, wearing some gentle cotton clothing, you are comforting, the bubbles wash over you like the suds that envelope you after a big wave has crashed in the ocean.
We will be out for deliveries this weekend. There’s lots of new wines in store in addition to these pet nats. As always, don’t hesitate to email us at rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or dm @rainbow_wines with any questions. See you soon!
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