Pet nat wine bubbles up

After orange wines hit their stride a few years ago, the Pétillant-Naturel - a natural sparkling often lovingly referred to as 'pet nat' wine - started bubbling up, due to its easy drinking style and short production time.

But, despite its seemingly new arrival, the Petillant-Naturel style is one of the oldest ways to make sparkling wine - pre-dating champagne.

Hailing from France, it isn't specific to a region like champagne is, and is a natural wine with minimal intervention - fermenting in the bottle you drink it from.

Read also:

Chris Ford, wine aficionado and co-owner of a specialty wine shop Commune Wine Store, describes pet nat as "the original peasant drink" or a "poor man's choice for sparkling wine".

"It's basically what champagne was before they mastered the art of making champagne," Mr Ford said.

"Back in the day, when they first started making it, it was cloudy, quite sweet and chunky bits used to float around in it - it was a huge hot mess.

"Which is why now pet nat is much more rugged and rural, compared to Prosecco, which is cleaner.

"The good thing about pet nats is that they are as close as you get to just grapes.

"There's nothing sinister in it."

According to Mr Ford, pet nat's have been drunk for at least the past 300 years, but in the past few years have seen a surge in popularity.

Back in October 2020, Mr Ford and his business partners, Peter Baker and Paul Heatley, opened Commune Wine Store, in Maylands in Perth, with at least 20 pet nats on the shelf.

They still stock just as many, with the demand continuing to grow.

Andrew Hoadley, winemaker from La Violetta in Denmark, has also seen and experienced this spike in demand.

Despite being one of the first WA wine makers to delve into the style, he has been pleasantly surprised at the growth in demand.

"The earliest I can remember seeing a pet nat in Australia was probably 2013," Mr Hoadley said.

"In 2014, we became aware of more and more lines of that style coming to Australia - but hadn't really tasted many.

"I was talking to Andries Mostert, from Brave New Wines, about it and he said he was going to make a pet nat that year and I was kind of teasing him for being trendy."

Despite his jests, Mr Hoadley, then stumbled into making a pet nat of his own.

Experimenting on a small scale with carbonic shiraz, he blended the shiraz with riesling and discovered that it was a delicious combination of the two iconic varieties of the Great Southern region.

"I realised that, with the sugar level where it was, it would be perfect to bottle that night for pet net," he said.

"So, staying up until about three in the morning, I hand-bottled about 30 cases."

Forgetting about it for six months, he finally remembered and showed it to a few people with really positive feedback.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

"The next year I was asked, are you making that pet nat again, which was a huge compliment so I thought, OK we'll do it again," Mr Hoadley said.

"It took off since then, and every year I would say to Andries, this whole pet nat thing, you know, this will be the last year.

"You know, it'll die, just watch, I really didn't think it would take off as much as it has."

Something that has contributed to the success of this style, according to both Mr Ford and Mr Hoadley, is the unpretentious nature of the wine.

"What really attracted me to making them and continuing to make them was, when people would drink sparkling wine in Australia there was always baggage attached to it - a bit of snobbery," Mr Hoadley said.

"Rules around the way you're supposed to drink it, with the kind of glasses and such.

"I hadn't started making pet nats with a view to breaking down that stigma, but I could see, people were just having a lot more fun with it.

"It's great to pull back some of that neurosis and make a space where people can just have some fun."

Mr Ford has seen the same thing, with pet nats sitting in, as he calls it, a "cross section of affordability and fun".

"You're not going to buy a bottle of pet nat now and leave it in the fridge for eight years, come back and be like, this couldn't be way better," he said.

"For champagne, you would.

"Most champagnes would hold-up well after two years, whereas pet nats are very much a 'drink now'.

"It's like liquid instant gratification."

The desire to grow and develop this style, along with the WA wine scene in general, is evident no matter who you speak to in the industry.

Tom Daniel, from Chouette, is a grower and wine maker in the Swan Valley who has been making pet nats for the past five years, driven by the love of the craft and the idea that he is part of people's joy around the dinner table.

"I just thoroughly enjoy making the stuff," Mr Daniel said.

"I like the idea that you put a lot of love into something and make stuff and that will be what people are drinking.

"In a way you have a hand in what's coming up for people to consume the next year and that's always a hook for me."

Mr Daniel has also been surprised at the growth in demand and, despite slowing down a little, can see more room in the mainstream market for this style of wine.

Having the luxury of being in a different climate than some of the other regions, he said Chouette was often able to land in a sweet spot of the market.

"In 2020, I made two pet nat wines and by the time they had got close enough to being ready to release to the market, there was nothing else available," he said.

"There was a hole in the market.

"Everyone was demanding it and knew that I had been making it.

"So I just started releasing it straight away and it all got consumed within two months.

"The demand was way higher than supply."

Mr Daniel has seen that demand fall back down a little.

But he believes that is mainly in the creative and bar trends scene, with growth still remaining for the mainstream consumer.

What's the difference in the process of making a pet nat wine compared to other wine?

"The only difference between orange wine and pet nat really, is you're bottling the pet nat before it finishes fermentation - the fermentation finishes in the bottle," Mr Ford said.

"Then the carbon dioxide has got nowhere to escape to, so it dissolves into bubbles.

"That's literally it."

During the first stage of fermentation, naturally-occurring yeast found on the skin of grapes eats the sugar in the fruit which, in turn, creates the alcohol in wine.

This process produces carbon dioxide as a by-product and, as Mr Ford explained, in the case of a pet nat, then gets trapped in the bottle.

This process makes it a tricky wine to master, with minimal to no additives such as sulphur, which traditionally helps to keep a bubbly wine stable.

"The timing is pretty critical," Mr Hoadley said.

"One of the big challenges is bottling these wines, as you are often in the middle of vintage, when there is lots going on.

"Then, during the process, you're basically trying to get a feel for what sugar level is going to give you enough fizz - without it being explosive or squirty - to get a well-behaved pet nat."

The process has come a long way in the past five years and, according to Mr Ford, he now can open 99.9 per cent of pet nat bottles without stress of the wine ending up all over the kitchen.

"They weren't planning them when they started coming out in commercial quantities, so you'd lose like a third to half the bottle, because it'll just gush once you open it," Mr Ford said.

"This showed they hadn't really dialed in on the sugar content when they bottled.

"The sugar content would have been too high causing too much carbon dioxide to be filling in the bottle."

Despite the need to master the bottling process, this gorgeous, fun, fruity and minimal intervention wine has gained a rumoured name for itself as a 'healthier' alternative.

Although it's important to remember that it has a high alcoholic content of 12-13pc, like most wines, depending on who you ask - pet nat may or may not help with the hangover in the morning.

"We don't add anything to our pet nets, they are not refined, it's a real true expression of the vineyard in that sense," Mr Hoadley said.

"That's kind of part of the fun, too, from a winemaking perspective, you have to let go of control and open yourself up to quite a bit of chance."

With summer tailing off behind us, the question on many passionate wine drinkers' lips may be, what's next for the wine industry?

Will next summer see another resurgence of pet nat, or will there be something new on the horizon?

According to all three experts, pet nats will open up to more chilled reds, something that already started to come through this summer.

"I think there's still room for a lot of stylistic diversity in Australian wine," Mr Hoadley said.

"Things like pet nats and chilled reds, they're just so well suited - particularly to an Australian summer - and I think there's room for this as a continuing category, as everyone still has a yearning for drinks like that."

As for the red style, Mr Daniel is seeing a heavy rose likely to come through.

"More reds made in a style that's a bit more slurpy and juicy," he said.

"So, it really suits putting in the fridge.

"Sort of somewhere between a heavy rose and a light red - somewhere in that space.

"The chilled reds style that has gone nuts this summer, will go again next summer, but it'll be more of a push towards refining that category to be more concise, rather than just putting light reds in the fridge."

Running a wine store, Mr Ford prides himself on "keeping my finger on the pulse of what's going on" when it comes to wine and believes that a plateau is happening for pet nats, and chilled reds potentially were the future.

However, he's keeping an open mind.

"I would have said six months ago it was a chilled red, but now I think more unusual grape varieties will be the flavour of the month," he said.

"I feel like we're going to go full circle and come back to well-made, classic wines."

As for the consumer, either way, finishing off these warmer days with a pet nat or natural chilled red, we will probably be very content.

And looking forward to next summer, where we can add words like 'juicy' to our wine vocabulary as we sip our beautiful locally produced wine.

More information: laviolettawines.com.au, commune.wine, chouettewine.com