In an excerpt from her new book, You Had Me At Pet-Nat: A Wine-Soaked Memoir, Rachel Signer chronicles her adventure about how to leave New York and follow an obsession with herbal wine led her to meet her former spouse (also known as ” Wildman “), establish a new life on a farm in South Australia (via Paris) and be informed of good looks, and many subtleties, of making wine in the old-fashioned way, adding your own bottles of pet-nat. and editor of Pipette mag also stores here his favorite bottles of the moment.
PFFFFFFFFFZZZZZZZZZZ. Wildman removed the crown cap from another bottle and put his neck through a hole in the gigantic plastic container. The excess wine foamed, bringing with it chunks of crystalline herbal deposits called tartrates, and lees made from dead yeast and grape skins that had accumulated in the bottle while he was upside down. Now the disgorging bottle was only three-quarters full. I was surprised that so much wine was lost in this process. “It will be worth it,” Wildman assured me. And I accepted, having already opened some sparkling wines without disgorgement, I can attest that they were also sprayed everywhere. Better to waste the wine here and offer consumers a well-finished wine that doesn’t make their face shine. Swaying to the beat of “Hot Stuff,” partly to keep warm and partly to maintain my power, I tipped a bottle of the same sparkling wine into the freshly disgorged bottles, pumping one into the other and then corking them. manually on a table. That day, we would repeat that with two hundred bottles of my pét-nat, a rosé wine that I made in early antiquity from a separate blend of fermented Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
“Well, I feel stupid,” I say. Wildman looked at me questioningly. “If you only knew,” I said, grabbing another bottle to open, “how many explanatory articles I have written that present pét-nat as the ‘simplest and easiest’ edition of champagne. It was true, of course, that the French fantasy was made with two fermentations, while the pét-nat had only one. But as I learned, the latter did not facilitate anything, especially since we made all the paintings by hand, with mechanical scrubbers and disgorging, as many champagne houses do. The challenge began with careful timing. wine bottling. Pét-nat is usually received by bottling the wine with a small amount of residual sugar, so that bubbles appear after the end of fermentation. In my case, I had been so busy running the basket press and picking the vines that my Pinot and Chardonnay had been dry fermented for a month. Therefore, we add fresh Gamay juice before bottling, to help restart fermentation. Wildman did the math carefully, using a textbook from his student years to calculate the precise number of liters we deserve to add. For his wines, he had been very sensible at the time and he bottled them gently. Either approach suited us, it was still pét-nat. Natural wine was a global without definitions, anyway.
“For herbal wine lovers, pet-nat is the center and song of our movement. “
For herbal wine lovers, pet-nat is the center and song of our movement, anything we depend on to create a joyful atmosphere with friends or kick off a weekend gathering. Nat is the bad guy in a leather jacket, while a bottle of champagne looks more like a woman in a Chanel suit with pearls. Of course, there are many winemakers-producers of champagne who grow and vinify entidepending by hand and whose wines can have quite exclusive aspects. Paintings very much of the great champagne “houses” that buy fruits from all over the region and use more or less a recipe to make their sparkling wines. But pet-nat is a favorite of the herbal wine movement because it refuses to put on its outfit.
At that time, folklore has it, in the south of France in the 16th century, the first sparkling wines arrived largely by a twist of fate when makers in the town of Limoux bottled their young juice before the end of the season. fermentation. Wine bottling was rare (it was served directly from the barrel). In cases where a wine is not yet dry, its residual sugar can also be transformed into carbon dioxide, that is, into bubbles, if fermentation is resumed after it has been bottled. Although it happened initially by possibility, this technique was followed as an intentional way of making sparkling wine and has come to be known as the ancestral technique, or the “ancestral technique,” as opposed to the technique developed in Champagne in France. 19th century The Champagne technique consists of bottling dry, still wine, with the addition of yeast and sugar to initiate secondary fermentation and aging it intensely in the cellar so that the sparkling wine develops complexity. At present, some wines classify the ancestral technique in obtaining sparkling wines, avoiding fermentation by controlling the temperature or by adding sulfur before bottling, at which time the procedure is allowed to resume. Generally, ancestral technique wines and Champagne are disgorged, that is, they are opened to let the tartrates and yeasts escape, before being filled and sealed with a cork stopper. The Pét-nat might or might not be disgorged. If it is slit, it is not normally resealed with a cork; a normal crown cap is sufficient. The express term pét-nat and his herbal wine ideology made the impression in the 1990s, the credit for this goes in particular to Christian Chaussard, who made wine in Vouvray until his death on a twist of fate tractor in 2012. At VouvrayArray the main grape variety is Chenin Blanc. Array, which can produce a sweet wine if harvested late. In the late 1990s, Chaussard bottled a Chenin Blanc wine with a touch of residual sugar, adding little or no sulfites to prevent fermentation. As a result, the wine continued in the bottle and became sparkling. Rather than throw away the wine, which he found very enjoyable, Chaussard called it an herbal sparkling wine, and cited the ancient technique as an example of its ancient occurrence. Pét-nat, therefore, is something perfectly postmodern in the sense that it is made with an irreverent eye towards a modern ancestor. It differs from ancestral technique wines in that yeasts or added preservatives cannot be used; It must be made exclusively with one hundred percent grapes.
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