Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Bottling Our Chenin Pét-Nat

One of the benefits of this season's harvest is that we had a little more Chenin Blanc juice than we expected, so my husband decided to make a few bottles of Pét-Nat, or pétillant naturel aka méthode ancestrale. To do this, he had to carefully monitor the sugar levels in the 10 liter keg to ensure that we had enough sugar to allow the fermentation to continue after we bottled the juice in champagne style bottles.
In reading more about this style, I came upon the online Esquire site that had an article called The 10 Best Pét-Nat Wines Under $40. This is what the article said: If Champagne is Rolex, pét-nat is Swatch. I think that is pretty clever.
To make our pét-nat, my husband made sure the starting wine had approximately 2-3% (20-30 grams/liter) sugar which will hopefully transform into 3-5 atmospheres of entrained carbon dioxide. So, on November 3, we racked the juice from our 10 liter keg into 9 champagne style bottles which we capped with a crown cap. The great thing about pét-nat is that there is no fining or filtering involved once the product is made in the bottle. So this sparkling will be a little hazy in the glass. Crossing fingers and hoping for fermentation to continue in the bottle.

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