Drink This: Osmote Wines 2021 This is Red Pet-Nat

A bright, brambly sparkler with savory, minty edges.

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive into Finger Lakes pet-nat recently. It’s been a lot of fun and truthfully, I could (and still may) highlight more of my favorites with “Drink This” designations. There are a lot of delicious examples being made in the Finger Lakes and in other parts of Eastern wine country.

I never want to assume that my readers know what pet-nat is, so here’s a quick rundown:

To make sparkling wine in the better-known méthode champenoise style, as in Champagne, a winery will typically harvest grapes earlier than usual to preserve natural acidity and bottle the resulting, bone-dry base wine. From there, sugar and yeast are added to the bottle to start a second fermentation. Those yeasts eat the sugar, producing alcohol and the carbon dioxide that makes the wine sparkling. After the yeasts have done their work, the lees — the dead yeast cells — are removed from the bottle, a process called disgorgement. Finally, a dose of sugar and wine may be added to sweeten the wine before the bottle is re-corked and closed with a wire cage for sale.

Depending on how long the lees are left in the bottle (they bring a nutty, toasty character) the entire process can take up to 10 years or longer.

Petillant naturel wines (known more casually as pet-nat) on the other hand, are rarely disgorged and are released just months after the grapes are picked. Instead of the double-fermentation process of méthode champenoise, pet-nat is made via méthode ancestral, which, as you can probably guess from the name, is a very old, traditional method that dates back centuries.

In méthode ancestral, the wine is bottled before primary fermentation — the fermentation that converts the grapes’ sugars into alcohol — is complete, capturing the carbon dioxide produced as primary fermentation finishes inside the bottle. The lees are typically left inside the bottle and the resulting wines tend to be lower in alcohol, less aggressively carbonated, and sometimes even cloudy compared to méthode champenoise wines.

You’ll find examples being made from just about every grape grown these days — and some interesting combinations too, like this Osmote Wines 2021 This is Red Pet-Nat ($20) a blend of leon millot, marquette, and cabernet franc.