If you’re a wine connoisseur (or even if you’re not), you may have come across Pet nat wine on your journey through the vineyards and wondered what it is. Well, pet nat wine is a naturally sparkling wine made through the traditional méthode ancestrale, where fermentation occurs in the bottle without added yeast or sugar.
It sounds a bit complicated but we promise it’s delicious. We’ll break it down for you a bit more and share what makes this bubbly so unique and beloved by many.
What is Pet Nat Wine
Pet nat wine, or pétillant-naturel to give it its full title, refers to an ancient way of producing sparkling wine. To get technical, pétillant-nature refers to wines produced in the méthode ancestrale, which predates the methode champenoise that most people are more familiar with. This means these wines are bottled before the primary fermentation and finished without secondary yeasts or sugars. More simply, pet nat is crafted with as little intervention as possible.
Pet nat wine can be white, rose, or red in colour and offers a spectrum of flavours to suit a variety of food dishes and palettes. The variety in carbonation levels means there’s a drink to satisfy most taste buds, from those who prefer more still wine to people who favour sparkling.
Pétillant-naturel – The Process
At Rosnay Organic, we have perfected our pet nat winemaking process to deliver a vibrant, fruity, spritzy beverage that can be enjoyed on its own, paired with food, or as a refreshing accompaniment to any occasion.
To produce the perfect pet nat wine, we start with 100% homegrown organic chardonnay grapes. The grapes are immediately pressed and hyper-oxidized with active solids maceration in a steel tank. This is done prior to fermentation and inoculation with house yeast.
Once fermentation is kicked off, the wine is chilled to ensure a slow, long, controlled process that isn’t aimed at killing the yeast but at having it settle in the bottom before the sparkling wine is bottled directly from the fermentation tank. From here, the wine continues to ferment in the bottle and is left “on lees” for another 3 months. Next, we “riddle” the wine to get the lees to settle at the top of the bottle. We wait 3 months before disgorging the wine and labelling it.
Our pétillant-naturel contains no added yeast, sulphate filing agents, or other additives. It delivers a superb natural organic wine that dances on the tongue and is a guaranteed hit with those who like a bit of sparkle in their wine.
Visit our Cellar Door
You can purchase directly from our website or Cellar Door, or you can sample our organic pet nat wine at one of our wine-tasting events. These events, held in our picturesque vineyard, offer a unique opportunity to learn about our winemaking process and taste a variety of our organic wines.