My 7 Favorite Pet-Nats of Summer 2022

Pet-Nat is everywhere now – but these are the East Coast ones worth seeking out

I think I wrote my first story about petillant naturel-style wines — pet-nat for short — back in 2015. At the time, there were two wineries here on Long Island making them and not many more in Eastern wine country.

Since then, the style has exploded, with wineries from Vermont down to the Carolinas making them along the coast and wineries in the upper Midwest and beyond joining in too. Even if many more wineries are making them, almost no one is making them at scale. These remain small-production wines for most producers, and as such, it can be hard to get your hands on them once they are released.

At least a couple of the wines listed below are sold out already. But, in my experience, these are all producers who you can trust to make pet-nat well — so look for the 2022s in the spring.

What is Pet-Nat?

Before I get into the big handful of examples that I found the most compelling and delicious this year, a bit about how these wines are made. I know that many of you know this already, but just in case…

While still fairly new to the East Coast and seemingly trendy, this style of wine isn’t new at all. In fact, the method is as rustic and old as the wines are fun to drink. 

Many Eastern wine regions are well suited to sparkling wine production, but relatively few wineries actually make it. Why? It’s because it’s a time-consuming and expensive process if you use what is known as the “Champagne Method.”

To make sparkling wine in the 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. That can be tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of sitting in a warehouse, in-process rather than being sold.

Pet-nat, on the other hand, is rarely disgorged and is 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.

And — in some cases, at least — pet-nats can be much more affordable than Champagne-method wines. That has changed a bit in the past five-plus years, however.

Anyway — here are my seven favorite pet-nats from summer 2022.