On Pét-Nat
Wine, from a woman who is not even remotely an expert!
Sometime during the pandemic, I stopped drinking liquor and beer. I was left with wine, something I had never said no to, but something I did not know anything about. In a sort of “I guess we’re doing this” fashion, I committed, hard. I read books and took classes, wanting to learn what I liked so I knew how to order. Long story short, I fell in love with wine—natural wine, to be specific.
It’s a personal policy not to evangelize about specific types of food or drink that you should or should not put into your body, so I don’t intend on preaching about natural wine in this newsletter; rather I just want to share what I have learned to love. What I will say here about natural wine is this: if you are someone who pays attention to the way that your food is grown, processed, and packaged, it’s a subject worth looking into. I’m not the person to lead you on that journey, but I’d recommend the wonderful Alice Feiring or my friend Marie Cheslik of Slik Wines as a resource.
The journey I am here to lead you on today is the one that ends with you enjoying a delicious bottle of pétillant naturel—AKA pét-nat. Pét-nat is the poster child for natural wine. It’s sparkling of its own accord, from the fermentation that continues after the wine is bottled, and it ranges from deliciously crisp and classic in style all the way over to so funky it may as well be kombucha.
Because natural wines, including pét-nats, typically do not have anything added to them to stabilize the wines or standardize the process, each bottle (including of the same wines from the same producers!) can be radically different. This is part of the magic!
Pét-nats have character to them in a way that other bottles of sparkling wine sometimes just don’t. (I feel this way about most natural wines.) The bottles of Pet'Golò, made by Poggio La Noce*, a winery just outside of Florence that I had the privilege of visiting last fall, for example, are crisp and acidic, evocative of grapefruit and rippingly tangy green apples. The bottle we opened this weekend with friends, I Suoli’s Piripicchio Brut Nature 2020, was such a smooth and sweet blend of flavors that I felt we could have poured it for anyone and masqueraded it around as prosecco. The Maloof Wines’ L`eau Epicée Pét-Nat we’ve had many times at BottlesUp, on the other hand, is so funky that you can almost hear the yeast ready to crash onto your taste buds when you pop the bottle.
It’s intimidating to talk this way about wines I’ve enjoyed, especially in this category. Natural wine is extremely polarizing and precariously defined, making it difficult to nail down and to talk generally about. Pét-nats in particular have a reputation for being out there and hard to enjoy, which breaks my heart. All wines deserve a chance to be enjoyed, damn it, especially wines made in this way.
While we were at Poggio, Enzo, the owner, was sorting freshly harvested grapes. He explained to us, over the slow grind of the conveyor belt, that it was by sorting the grapes by hand that they understood how best to use them to make delicious wines like the ones we had tasted that day. The intimacy of the moment, watching a stranger put so much care into something so fragile and fleeting, actually made me cry. I think of this conversation every time I sip Pet'Golò or enjoy another pét-nat. That’s where the character comes from—the actual characters behind the bottle. Lean in to this! We love character and characters.
Your friendly neighborhood wine salesperson will be able to guide you to a bottle with the character that’s right for your tastes. I, for example, prefer something so crisp you can hardly tell it’s natural wine, whereas Colin likes things about as wild as you can get. I’m not here to sell you a particular bottle. I’m just here to get you to try a pét-nat.
Coming up! Thoughts on how recipes are written, food as nostalgia, and a cry for recommendations for what to read. Paid subscribers are getting recipes for roasted tomatoes (what else in this glorious summer weather!) and a blueberry citrus cake that has long been a warm-weather favorite.
*I do need to disclose that I provide Poggio La Noce with the occasional recipe and photograph in exchange for wines. However, even if I did not, I would still rave to you about their sincere care for what they do and their delicious products.
I love this. I feel a lot of these same things about “natural” / low-intervention / minimal intervention wine. There is so much to like or even love about the people making it.