Traditional sparkling wine is expensive to make and drink. “I think the reason people are drinking pét-nat is the same reason why I ended up making it after years of eyeing up traditional method. It’s also a method that can heighten less-explored grapes and regions that might struggle to get the tannin, ripeness or climate necessary to make more traditional wines. “First, the bottle-soon-drink-soon nature of pét-nat goes hand in hand with the rise of natural wine. “Pét-nats are definitely trendy right now,” he said. Lucas Meeker, winemaker for his family’s Meeker Vineyards in Healdsburg, is one of Sonoma’s “mad professors” experimenting with the various ways bubbly can be made. Out gushes a fruity, slightly creamy and easy-to-drink sparkler that lacks the complexity of Champagne-like wines, yet is crowd-pleasing in its simplicity.
The French call this process méthode ancestral, with the yeast staying in contact with the wine until the cap is removed. There are pétillant naturels, or pét-nats for short, which are bottled while still undergoing a first fermentation and closed with a crown cap instead of a cork. Yet wines made with less-intensive methods, and using nontraditional grape varieties, have burst upon the scene. In the 1980s, Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards, Iron Horse Vineyards, J Vineyards & Winery and Piper Sonoma joined Korbel Champagne Cellars (established 100 years earlier) as power players in the sparkling wine scene in Sonoma, turning sunny California fruit into wines with brioche and toasty aromas and flavors, a fine bead of tiny bubbles and crackling acidity. A number of Sonoma wineries long ago mastered the time-consuming techniques for making sparklers that mirror the quality and depth of true Champagne, which relies on chardonnay and pinot noir for the base wines and a secondary fermentation in the bottle, called méthode champenoise.
0 kommentar(er)
