Pét-Nat Production: An Industry Roundtable

- Welcome, everybody, to the "Eastern Viticulture and Enology Forum" series of webinars.

It's a presentation between the cooperation between Penn State, Virginia Tech and Cornell.

It's a series that has been running throughout the winter and into the spring with topics on both viticulture and enology.

You may've just heard us say this, but just so everybody's aware, of course, this presentation will be recorded and may be shared with participants and, additionally, published online.

So anything you say or type will be recorded today.

The EVEF forum has been going throughout the winter and of the spring, as I said.

We have one more webinar coming in May and I believe that topic is still a little bit up in the air.

Molly, is that correct?

- [Molly] Yeah, that's correct.

To be determined, Chris. - TBD, yes.

We can wipe out TBD in our lifetimes, (Molly chuckles) yeah, if we all work together.

All right.

Yeah, thanks to Molly Kelly from Penn State and Beth Chang for being driving forces in the organization and operation of these webinars.

Molly Kelly is organizer of this webinar and is in the background today.

Beth Chang from Virginia Tech will be monitoring the chat and so if you do have questions, you can post them in the Q & A tab.

You should have a Q & A tab either at the top or the bottom of your screen along where you do all the muting and, well, you can't mute today, but all the other things you click on in your Zoom panel.

We will pause after our kind of the first overall panel discussion for Q & A.

So as soon as you have a burning question, type that in there and Beth will collect them and then she will save those for that time in the webinar and then we'll get to those.

So whenever you have a question, just go ahead and type it.

This is a panel discussion today and we're gonna be talking about Pet-Nats, pettillant naturel, and we are thrilled to be joined by Phil Plummer from Montezuma and Idol Ridge Wineries.

Maya Hood White had some power issues and, hopefully, she'll be able to rejoin us.

I can't see if she's up with us yet, but she is from Early Mountain Vineyards and, hopefully, will be joining us one way or another.

Bob Green from Presque Isle in Pennsylvania.

Steve DiFrancesco who is a recently retired winemaker, long time, many seasons, 40 seasons or so in the Finger Lakes most recently retiring from Lenora, now a consulting winemaker and Kyle Jones from Acadian Wine Company.

So we're thrilled to have all these panelists here to talk about Pet-Nats.

I'm gonna give a brief rundown right now of what we mean when we say Pet-Nat.

As you can see, there's a number of names and a number of languages that are used to talk about Pet-Nat, but what we mostly mean is a wine that is carbonated through natural means, though not necessarily by traditional method or Methode Champenoise techniques.

And so that's, yeah, you know the traditional method, there's many steps to doing this where there's going to be a primary fermentation, then there's going to be a secondary fermentation in the bottle and then there'll be riddling and disgorging, dosage and the whole crown and cage, cage and cork technique.

The method ancestral or Pet-Nat is, generally, basically where we're going to partially ferment our wine and then while the fermentation still has some sugar left to ferment and some yeast involved, we're gonna bottle it.

And we'll talk more about all the different ways, that's a very general term to describe a broad spectrum of potential techniques.

But the overall thing is we're gonna use some remaining fermentation action from the primary fermentation to create the bubbles and so that's kind of the basics of it and we'll go into what that may or may not be involved.

It's one of the latest wine crazes, but if you talk to the people who are serious about this, they'll tell you, well actually, this was probably the first sparkling wine.

There's many stories online, some involving monks and things like that.

It always seems to be monks when we get back to sparkling wine history, who may have, basically 500, 700, however many years ago, people made wine, they fermented it.

It got cold.

They assumed the fermentation was done.

They bottled the wine, maybe they racked it, maybe they didn't, but they definitely bottled it.

And then the spring came and things warmed up and what do you know, the fermentation wasn't actually done, it had just been kind of chilled.

And some spritz got into the wine and people thought, hey, this is kinda cool.

Historical records do not talk about how many bottles shot their corks out onto the couch, but we can assume it was some, right.

But everyone says, no, this is probably good.

Anyway, there are many European regions that claim some kind of historic version of this.

You know in Italy and France, especially, they say this isn't new.

This is something we've been doing for a lot of years.

Not only is the first, we've been doing it more or less since that time.

And so you have to be careful with wine know-it-alls saying that this is a new trend or anything like that.

But I think we can all agree it's relatively new to the United States and new to wine consumers.

Are there rules? That's a good question.

You know I think the overall idea when we're talking about a Pet-Nat, what everybody can agree on is we're talking about a wine that is slightly sparkling, lightly fermented, lightly bubbling.

Not completely fermented, or at least completely fermented.

One fermentation happened, not a secondary fermentation and was bottled at some point during that process.

Generally, it's a crown cap that's added to show how this is not Champagne.

This is not traditional method sparkly wine.

This is something different.

And then beyond that, it gets really hazy, pun semi intended, on what actually a wine has to be or not to be a Pet-Nat.

There tend to be stronger connotations of minimal intervention overall.

This is a wine that's supposed to be kind of generally thought of as a wine that could be produced with less, probably not yeast added, probably not much SO2 added.

It's all these kind of things.

There's no hard and fast rules, just like what is a Pet-Nat?

What is a reserve wine, right?

What is a select wine?

All these kind of things.

It means different things to different wineries, different things to different winemakers, regions, all that kind of thing.

There is no hard and fast rule.

So that's why the only things I could put in black were, basically, that it's generally lightly sparkling made from one fermentation and using a crown cap.

But a sustainable, kind of low intervention ethos does pervade many Pet-Nats.

And then you know when you read about what the pundits say, it's generally considered to be a wine that is kind of fresh, funky, fun, low stakes, informal, easy drinking.

You know the same kind of conditions and situations and occasions that you might consider for a Rose or Beaujolais Nouveau or other kind of wine.

That it's not supposed to be what you serve at a state dinner, but it might be something that you have at a picnic.

And once again, none of these things are hard and fast rules.

These are just the overall kinda aesthetic and vibe that we get from these wines.

And so that's why I think that there can be this huge spectrum of how we're gonna make this.

It can be as simple as we had a wine, we fermented it to a certain percentage, most of the way, and then we bottled that wine directly.

You know that was all we did.

That's the very basic.

Or you can go very serious in terms of really, really monitoring your fermentation.

Some people do even go to dryness so they know exactly how much sugar that they've consumed and then they might add a little sugar back or a little juice back.

You might take a ton of methods including fining or enzyme additions to control protein, to control foaming.

You might consider filtration so that you know where you are with your yeast after you've got the fermentation to the point you want.

So there's lots of ways you you can kind of modify this to give you more control and more repeatability.

And that's when you can start this whole discussion of am I doing something that is fitting with the ethos of a Pet-Nat or am I making a lightly fizzy wine that lots of people enjoy and they don't really care how it was made?

And that's the discussion we can all get into later today.

And so I compare it to a TikTok recipe where they say you can cook a turkey breast, put it in the microwave for 10 minutes and then use a hair dryer for 10 minutes more and it's done.

You can serve it, right.

Versus if you ever looked at "America's Test Kitchen" you know they have like 37 steps on how to make the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

It's a lot more work, but it's a lot more repeatable.

And so that all comes into both technical precision and repeatability versus something that's supposed to be fun and funky and easy.

And so I look forward to talking to our panel about how they approach both of these methods.

As I said, natural wine and petillant naturel are often mentioned in the same sentence, in the same breath and so people tend to believe that or associate the two with each other.

And I think that some people have strong feelings about how these two may or may not intermingle and does it have to be a spontaneous fermentation or a no yeast added?

How much SO2 is is appropriate?

Is this supposed to be some kind of, you know this low-input method show how you can make wines that have a lower footprint, kind of overall lower carbon footprint.

All right, so the questions that I have after reading many articles written by people in the middle between the consumer and the producer is which way should we go?

Is this supposed to be cheap and fun?

Is this supposed to be something we take quite seriously because it has a chance to kind of dovetail with sustainability and historical recreations and things like that?

Maybe both. Maybe neither.

So with that, I would like to bring our panelists in to talk about what they make, how they make it, why they make it.

And looking around the room, I'm going to start with Phil.

- Thanks, Chris.

So you talked about the spectrum of Pet-Nat and we are not super on the Nat end of that here at Montezuma.

We make a lot of different products and we're perpetually shorthanded, so it makes it really difficult.

One of the challenges of Pet-Nat is timing and you talk about harvest and all the other things that we've got going on and timing bottling so that you end up with the right amount of bubble and not too much and not too little and the right amount of residual sweetness is one of the things that you have to navigate around.

So all of our Pet-Nats, so far, are inoculated.

We've found that we really like EC-1118 as our yeast that we use.

Typically, when we're making Pet-Nat style wines, we're getting them fermenting and then when they coast into a residual sugar that seems to be about right for us, and that's a moving target based on the stylistic aims of the wine, we're chilling those tanks down, letting them sit for about a week, racking them, chilling them for another week or so, racking again and going to bottle.

And that has the effect of maybe doing a little bit of tartrate stabilization, allowing us to bring the yeast population down a bit and limiting the amount of stuff that goes into the bottle that could potentially cause gushing downstream.

We have found in the past that the EC-1118 is pretty predictable as to where it shuts off due to pressure.

So we have left residual sugar behind in Pet-Nats by being crafty about where we bottle them.

We've tried to do that with other yeast strains and found them to be more pressure tolerant and that's a really, really exciting disgorging day if you have to have it.

We did a Frontenac Gris in 2021 that was over pressurized enough that a few of the bottles lost caps in our neck freezer and launched themselves across the room.

So we're not gonna do that again, but it's something that we feel really strongly about as a stylistic direction for us.

It's the most accessible way of making sparkling wine as far as I'm concerned.

Basically, anybody can do it.

And there's the expectation that there's gonna be some funkiness to it.

So it's kind of a low stakes, definitely something I think everybody should try.

- Thanks, Phil.

Bob, would you like to go next?

You're still muted, Bob.

- There we go.

Now you can hear me, I bet.

- [Chris] Yes.

- Let's start over.

What I was saying was our first Pet-Nat was actually, I don't wanna call it a mistake because it was intentional realization that we had some wine that was fermenting on wild yeast and what are we going to do with it?

And actually, it was a little bit of Riesling that was leftover.

We sell juice as part of the business model and we have a trailer, you know a refrigerated trailer full of tanks of juice and we sell them during season.

And we had this little bit, like I don't know, 50 gallons or 75 gallons of Riesling that didn't get sold and it was sitting in the trailer and started fermenting on its own.

It was a variable capacity tank and the lid sunk because it was fermenting and I looked in it and I said, "Just get rid of it." And someone said, "Wait a minute, it tastes good." And so I taste and I said, "It is really good." So we had a natural fermentation.

I said, "Bottle it." So we racked it out carefully and put it into sparkling wine bottles and it was the best one we've ever made.

That was a couple years ago now, 2020 maybe or somewhere around there.

Actually, really good.

Riesling is a variety that I like to use with it.

It's got the right flavor.

It's got good balance.

We ferment it down, now.

We try to shoot for somewhere around two to five Brix and then bottle at that point.

I've done them before using Traminette, which is what our current one is.

It's good.

It doesn't have the same characteristics as the Riesling does in terms of fermentations and kind of what we get out of it.

We're pretty low tech about it.

Mostly, I monitor the fermentation or my cellar worker does and when we get to where I think the right point is going to be, then we'll pull the trigger and get it in the bottle and hope that it keeps going.

In terms of some issues that have come up, I had a Traminette one year that absolutely refused to ferment once we bottled it and, as a result, we ended up dumping it back to tank.

We actually cleaned the bottles out and rebottled the next batch in it and it actually is doing much nicer.

Again, Traminette and letting it ferment out.

This one has a little bit of sugar.

Some of them, the first Riesling fermented to dryness and actually it was quite nice.

We did another Riesling this last year.

Small batch also fermented to dryness.

Also, very nice flavors.

Again saying, you know Riesling is my preference for variety.

What am I hoping to achieve with this?

For me, it's a way to get a small production of sparkling wine, a good sparkling wine, on the market without having to go through the whole disgorging process and all that goes along with that.

Which I do it another winery and, actually, quite successfully and once we kind of get the hang of that, it's not too bad, but there is more equipment involved.

There's definitely more time involved and may be a little bit more controlled, at least from the way I'm doing it, the Champagne method.

But I think as we're doing more Pet-Nats, I see doing more control with them.

In terms of, and as Phil was saying, making sure we use different yeasts or, hopefully, going back to the original model and using some of the non-Sacc yeast to get started and then finishing it off with maybe EC-1118, because I like the idea of the yeast crapping out on me a little bit early and kind of finishing off with some sugar.

So I hope to be able to do this for a long time.

I mean I think the interest is there in the marketplace.

Consumers are willing to put up with a little bit of gunk in the bottle if you explain why it's there.

And I'm mostly hand selling this, it's not going into distribution.

So works for me.

- Thanks, Bob. Kyle.

- Hi. Thanks.

Great comments so far from Bob and from Phil.

I think one of the things that jumps out to me in the genre is context, which I think other folks pretty much alluded to and have detailed.

Is there an end goal that we've identified or is there a size batch?

In the case of Bob, where you find a tank and you know if it's a convenient size batch, you put it in the bottle and have a small scale experiment to, potentially, a larger, more replicable applications like Phil does with a larger kind of output.

I've done them on small scales for potential for different avenues with less than ideal success.

But on a small batch just for experimental things, selling from hand-to-hand at a tasting bar.

I've had great success with that and I do see scalability with the idea of having something less intervention or less interventional, hearkening back to kind of some old-school ways of doing things.

But also acknowledging that for things to be replicable or potentially scalable, there needs to be some semblance of control.

And so having respect for the process first and just an idea towards whimsy and experimentation helps when approaching the process.

An example that I had was with more of an experimental approach, but also there was this idea that it might be fun in a smaller format, which I would say, right off the bat was not a successful endeavor.

Since it is carbonated with some unpredictability, you want a little bit of extra volume.

So 750 milliliter bottle is pretty much as ideal as it could be in my mind.

I've also done them in kegs and put them on tap in wineries.

And that's pretty fun, because it's a larger volume to account for some of the pressure.

And the container having gushing for our customers is never fun.

And so when you're serving it in a tasting room, you can present the adequate parameters for an idyllic service, which then transfers to sales.

But then having to answer for things like, "Hey, I lost half the bottle when I opened it." That's never fun to field those kind of emails and phone calls.

There has to be a little bit of intention behind the process, I think, Because like Phil said, it's during harvest and there's a lot of other things going on.

It's fresh juice a lot of times and it's fresh fermentation and in a perfect world, you get it in the bottle before it finishes and you have some semblance of tartrate stability, you have some semblance of clarity, so that after it finishes at whatever sweetness you want it to be, whether it's got some or has even gone completely dry.

When I did a Gruner for a more commercial application in the smaller format, it was a very hearty yeast and so it fermented all the way out to dryness and I'm sure would've finished out as a more traditional sparkling wine in a beautiful way and do a traditional disgorgement, get the wine fully clear and all residual particulates out of it.

It was a really cool wine and in the Pet-Nat form it might've been cool too.

It just had too many tartrates left over.

And so in a 375 ml bottle when you have any kind of gushing the thing's gone and so that was a little bit annoying or of an annoyance.

But, yeah, in my tap room right now, I have a piquette-style wine that's made from the skins and seeds and some residual pomace from red ferments and it's bottled just kind of, it's been kicking around in tanks since harvest.

But when it was young it was a lot of fun to put on tap and have some of that fresh kind of fine bubble also within the tap system to really brighten these kind of mundane castaway beverages off to create a new genre with it.

And if you're selling it and you're having that interaction within the context of a bright sunny day in June, you know it makes for a marketable product as well.

So that's my two cents for now.

- Great. Thanks, Kyle.

Steve.

- Thanks, Chris.

So I have a lot of experience with traditional method sparkling and the parameters are so tightly structured right from the grape varieties and harvest and pressing and fermenting, dry, putting cuvees together and secondary fermentation, then dosage and everything like that.

And the Pet-Nats are like so opposite of that.

They're so unstructured.

So much less structured.

I mean with traditional method there's expensive varieties you're supposed to use too.

And what's kind of neat about Pet-Nat is that they can be made with different varieties, which is pretty neat, but it's also varieties that are probably less expensive too.

So I have some friends who I didn't ask them, I should've gotten permission to use their names, but they're kind of famous in the Finger Lakes and in New York.

They're partners and they have a pretty well-known Pet-Nat that I give them my hand with.

I feel like it's harder work in a way because the first couple of years we tried to stop or bottle it at the perfect time.

Which meant like 2:15 AM on Saturday night, everybody'd have to come in and we'd bottle it, which didn't work out too well.

So trying to slow it down and time it so it'd be perfect and be ready to bottle during the 40-hour work week from 8:00 to 4:30 was pretty tricky.

So what we did last year is we fermented most of it dry and then we kept back a portion that we could blend back in.

So we also cut back on the sugar and with classic method it's 24 grams per liter and they were having a lot of trouble disgorging it because it was so wild and you know so much stuff in it.

So they wanted to cut back to 20 grams per liter.

It turned out that by fermenting most of it dry and adding back about 13% of the volume of the original, the juice which had to be held and you know so it wouldn't ferment and then we had to check that again, make sure it didn't change, go by what it was when we're ready to add it.

And we did trials to know that we had the right Brix or specific gravity at bottling.

So that's how we did at that time and it was less trouble getting it into the bottle.

With you know the variables, I would say you wanna really be careful that your caps and bottles and application equipment that your cap are all gonna be compatible and be able to handle some more pressure in case you didn't get that exactly right.

But that's where I feel like you really need to know going in the bottle with the caps what the sugar needs to be.

Now the unique varieties.

This product's made with Catawba and that's a very, fruit-driven variety that made excellent sparkling wines in the Finger lakes for many, many years before the wine writers told us we weren't supposed to like it.

In Vermont, there's a Pet-Nat that's made with co-fermented Brianna, pressed Marquette and whole cluster Concords.

I mean how cool is that, that you could do something like that?

And the things that Phil does are pretty amazing too with skin-fragmented Catawbas and things like that are pretty exciting.

It's a lot of fun to work with.

It's really different.

I was reading something on the Internet about how it's so much cheaper than Champagne which, yeah, real Champagne perhaps.

But I think a lot of the Pet-Nats are more expensive than say Prosecco, but they're less expensive than real Champagnes.

But I don't see them being all that inexpensive, because they're so variable.

I mean I see some people have a lot of losses and trouble making them.

So anyway, I think it's nice that the lines between the different beverage categories are kinda blurred with the younger people and there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean we don't all have to drink the exact same thing and be embarrassed at a restaurant if we don't have the right thing on the table.

And, unfortunately, Zima has come back.

But other than that, you know I think it's great that young people are more open-minded and Pet-Nats have a reputation for being more natural and I don't know what's so unnatural about fish bladders, but actually we don't use them.

But if somebody wants to they can and I won't get in their way.

But anyway, you know there's that implication and in many cases it's true, but that also brings mousiness and VA and some issues that some more tools in the winery could help mitigate a little bit.

Okay.

- Thanks, Steve.

You touched on a few things that I think we might explore further as we go.

You know so, Beth, I see we have one question in the chat and I think it's a perfect question because the next question I was gonna ask people were about problems and how to solve those problems.

So do you wanna read that question and then we can put it to our panel?

- [Beth] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, there's only been one so far.

Feel free to enter any other questions in the Q and A or in the chat.

But for right now to get this topic started, why does gushing happen?

Doesn't seem like it correlates with total CO2 in solution.

That was the question posed.

So I'll just stop there.

- Who wants to start with that one?

Does anybody wanna raise their hand or?

Phil, you wanna go first? All right.

- Yeah, this is something that we deal with from year to year.

I think gushing happens more because of the other stuff that's in the bottle.

It's the same idea behind all those viral videos from a few years ago with Mentos and Diet Coke.

That's what's happening in your Pet-Nat bottle.

It's not just that there's CO2 there, it's there's CO2 there with stuff to cede out of solution.

So as soon as you crack the cap on that, it's finding a way out of the bottle and that's where you see them gush.

Historically, we've done a Riesling Pet-Nat style for our Idol Ridge brand and that's something that we've just built disgorging into the process because that's a way to make sure that we can prevent the gushing when it gets to the customer.

With other stuff, we've just way over pressurized it.

It's something to kind of be aware of and navigate around.

One other thing that I would say about gushing is that when I was talking before about how we're trying to hold these wines cold for a few weeks at a time to try and get some tartrates to drop out and to get some of the sediment that's naturally gonna precipitate out of the wine to end up in the bottom of the tank rather than in the bottom of the bottle.

And we also add just a little bit of riddling aid to our Pet-Nat fermentations because I find that it keeps that yeast at the bottom of the bottle a little bit more compact so that when you open the bottle you don't see as much ceding of the bubbles coming up when you release some pressure.

- All right. Steve, I think you had your hand up as well.

Was that- - Yeah, I was gonna say it's the sediment and the nucleation of the CO2, like Phil said.

And with a classic method, we always wanted to get as clean as possible because I mean if the last glass of sparkling wine had a little bit of cloudiness, who's was gonna notice?

But it was more about the gushing during disgorging and when it gets to your Aunt Sally's table at Easter and it goes all over the tablecloth.

And that was always an issue when you're trying to make sparkling wine out of red wines is that they tended to gush more and be a lot more trouble just getting them disgorged.

With the Pet-Nats, like other natural wines if we're lumping them together which might as well, cloudiness and sediment are not only tolerated but they're almost expected.

And so you're gonna have a lot of trouble when you open the bottle and lots of times you brought the bottle someplace to drink it at your friend's or you just bought it and took it home and the car ride didn't help it, too.

So just those kinds of things and if you pay 30 bucks for a bottle of wine and a third of it's all over the place, you didn't get to drink it, that seems like it'd be a little bit annoying to the consumer, but.

- Definitely, as someone who takes in samples for our lab, we are always nervous about pretty much everything we open, but especially if we see Pet-Nat, if we see all that kind of, you know that makes us concerned that we're gonna be wearing it.

Kyle or Bob, do you have anything to add to that or?

- I was just gonna say I don't mind bottling later or at less sugar, 'cause it doesn't need to be six bars in a bottle to have the balancing effect of the effervescence in a lot of these cases.

And I don't know, my clientele tends towards drier and so they don't mind that it's not holding onto a lot of residual sweetness and it still has that brightening effect of the CO2.

And then it's less tendency, but yeah, those nucleation points definitely make a difference.

And if there's enough stuff in the bottle, especially those hard crystalline things that form those nice structures that bubbles like, the proteins and tannins not so much, but yeah.

- Yeah, I would say I would agree with what Kyle said about like the drier.

I like the drier style better and it can have less carbonation than a traditional sparkling wine Champagne method.

The other thing I was gonna add, though, is in terms of gushing I'm currently dealing with a Method Champagne couple of bottlings back in 2020 that apparently the proteins were enough that they really have messed up the gushing and these wines gush when we disgorge and it's really a pain in the neck.

The thing about them is you look at them and you go they are absolutely crystal clear.

There is nothing in there that you can see, but when you open the bottle it definitely happens.

So yeah, you can't even assume that just because it's a clear wine, it's not gonna gush.

- Yeah, and it seems like reds, right?

Reds are almost always gonna be more problematic than whites in this situation.

Yeah. - Yeah.

- [Chris] All right, so we talked about gushing a little bit.

You know, I think, you've each kind of given us some tips and some tricks.

You know I think Phil mentioned like riddling aids.

Kyle was mentioning leaving them a little bit longer, so they can kind of settle out a little bit better.

So are there other methods, other ideas that you've kind of learned the hard way that you think that now you're like we'll never do it, now we'll always do it this way.

Again, is there anything else you wanna share along those lines?

- I just talked to somebody in the Hudson Valley who has got some pretty wild things he's trying.

He could take Phil on, on this (chuckles)

and I mean that very respectfully, of course.

But he's a cider maker and he actually is trying to make keeved ciders, if you know what that is.

So that's pretty out there.

So anyway, he is planning, he's got this idea that he's going to go into the bottle a little sweeter and then when the bottle fermentation's progressed to the sugar he wants to leave it at, he's gonna chill them at that point.

So I'm not sure how that's gonna work, but it's gonna be interesting to follow how that goes.

And if after three bars the yeast still reproduce, I mean but they still are alive and that's where the extra pressure comes in.

But maybe he stops it soon enough that they will become dormant and hopefully die and maybe even go in with a low inoculum or stressed enough that they're not gonna be super vigorous and he'll be able to stop it at that rate.

So you know in a way that is like, it'd be a lot easier just to make classic method and back sweeten in the dosage, but you know if you're trying different things, you know who knows?

Just an observation from a conversation I had with someone.

- Yeah, I was gonna say that the variability, like particularly if you're doing spontaneous fermented, you don't know how that yeast wants to behave.

You don't know where the pressure tolerance is.

You don't know what's going to affect what ends up in your downstream product.

And I think that's, I kind of alluded briefly at the very beginning that we've been producing Pet-Nats for several years now and then in 2021 I tried changing up yeast strains a little bit and had disastrous results.

And this was going from one commercial yeast strain to another and just not accounting for how it responded to pressure.

So we use EC-1118 most of the time, but what I've found is that QA23 tolerates a bit more pressure and ends in a really messy way.

We made a skin ferment Frontenac Gris Pet-Nat that we were hoping to leave a little residual sugar in and the yeast just blew through everything.

It was a really small lot.

We only made about 15 cases, but the disgorging left us with nine because it was such a gusher and it was dangerous.

There were a couple bottles, the necks exploded and it was just not, not a fun day.

The variability is both an attractive piece of this and not and also like kind of the difficult piece.

I think the messiness of Pet-Nat is part of the allure for some of us, but don't ask us about that on disgorging day.

- All right, Beth has got a couple questions.

I think we might zag a little bit and go one kind of philosophical question then back to the technical questions of which there are a few.

Is that what you wanna do, Beth?

- [Beth] Yeah, I was thinking if that's okay with you, I noticed thematically it seemed like we're starting to get some questions moving in that philosophical direction and I wanna make sure to hit it before we run out of time, if that's okay.

Or we can do all the technical and then- - Let's do the philosophical one and then we'll come back to the technical ones.

- [Beth] Okay. Yep.

So for those of who are, thank you for submitting Q and A, we're gonna try to get all of them.

But we're gonna skip to Jonathan Oak's question.

How do each of you define your ethos within the word natural?

Do you find the majority of consumers care?

Do your marketing teams give very much, if any, thought about the zero-zero natty police?

So that was very specific and then just in general, I think there was some discussion, might lead back to this on the technical side about SO2.

So if when you're answering that question, you also talk a little bit about your SO2 management techniques that may help lead back into some of these technical questions.

Thanks.

- Kyle, would you like to lead off on answering this question?

- Sure.

I've had the, I guess, the fortune of being able to make my living as a professional winemaker.

And so sometimes it depends on the organization that you work for and destination of the product.

And that's kind of how you guide the ethos and depends on the end consumer.

'Cause there's certain clients that'll say no.

The vast majority, they don't care.

They just want the product to be clean and easy to handle and no extra thought given.

And then there's other sales rooms that are more oriented towards telling the story and talking about the entire through line of what brings these products to be.

And so I also now have the good fortune of being the main salesperson in my tasting room, as well as, the wine grower and the wine maker.

And so I am a very direct-focused sales opportunity.

And so I find that when we do take the time to engage customers in that story, they're very open and very perceptive to whatever goes on behind the scenes, as long as the product in front of them still is enjoyable.

At the end of the day, a lot of ethyl acetate is gonna turn most people off, excessive mousiness and those Brettanomyces type vineyard infections that make your wine smell like a hockey bag.

Some customers aren't for that and they're gonna say, "Hey, I like the story but it's not what I'm taking home." And other folks that they, it's a case-by-case basis.

Which makes it a lot of fun because if that's your approach towards the winemaking and you can bring it to the customer, that's all part of the journey, as opposed to making a product that then has to go sell itself.

But yeah, I mean I've gotten to do things like yeah, the no SO2, no intervention, it's just bringing in nice clean grapes after a gorgeous harvest season and seeing what they do and letting the wine become itself and entering into that partnership knowing that the wine that is a result is gonna hit a bar that you know people are going to enjoy.

And having that from jump will guide your decisions because it's in the front of your mind.

It's not an afterthought that's happening just as a byproduct of commercial winemaking.

- Bob, do you have anything to add or thoughts on that?

- I don't know how much really I can add to that.

But I would say that, I mean Kyle brought up the marketing effect and I think that's been a big driver of kind of what I do and don't do.

You know as a winemaker you have to be able to meet the demands of the marketing team, because they're the ones out there selling a product.

And as painful as it is sometimes, they also make the money so I'll give it to them.

But I always feel like with me, like working with something like a Pet-Nat is a chance for me just to kind of kick back and see what happens and play around with a few things.

So I prefer the small batch approach to it.

You know if we can do a couple of different ones in a season even, I'm okay with that.

It's kind of playing around in a certain way, but at the same time there's a market that we can sell to that likes a wine that isn't the same as everything else.

And so to kind of capitalize on the wildness and the naturalness of it, I think is kind of nice.

So I mean I try to be as natural with them as possible, as anyone can in a modern winery setting.

And you know in some ways we're pretty primitive, not super high-tech.

But also we crank out a lot of product in a very short period of time.

So we have to pay attention to what we're doing as well.

I get away with what I can, I guess, is the way I would put it.

- All right, so, Steve.

- Chris, you and I were at CiderCon and I don't know if you listened to, Sunny Gandera was her name.

She was from Norway.

She did a talk at lunch.

It was pretty eye-opening about people being plant curious and wanting to know more about where their food comes from and not only for healthful reasons, but sustainability and things like that.

And so I think that being conscious of consumers wanting that kind of thing.

And I think more and more places like Whole Foods are gonna tell us how to make wine not the TTB, you know which is more consumer-driven than the big bad government on you.

So being conscious of those kinds of things, I think there's opportunities to show these things in a good light.

And I made a joke about fish bladders, but you know isinglass probably isn't a bad thing, particularly unless they're overfishing.

I don't know how they harvest fish bladders exactly.

But I guess polyvinylpyrrolidone isn't very natural sounding and we use that in the winery, I haven't used them in years.

But being able to let the consumers know that things are healthful and sustainable I think is helpful and younger people are interested in that and that's opportunities with our products to showcase that.

- Yeah. Are you feeling, I guess I'm gonna ask.

So do you feel a pull from certain markets?

Are you sensitive to accounts, wholesale accounts that are saying we want the most natural, the most sustainable, the most organic wine you have?

Or is that kind of anything you're noticing is out there?

Is there a pull there?

And to tag onto that, how much SO2 are you using in most of your Pet-Nats and is any of your thought on your SO2 use along the lines we've been talking about?

Or are you totally going by technical needs, basically, for SO2?

So Phil, let's start there.

- Yeah, so to answer the first part of your question, I think one of the benefits that we have is that the term natural is really poorly defined.

It's something where you do have the zero-zero crowd that's like very stringent, but there's some wiggle room there and I think winemaking's more fun when we ditch the dogma.

So it's something where, as Kyle has mentioned, like what are you trying to make?

There are some wines that are gonna respond to more intervention and other ones that are gonna be just fine without it and it just depends.

I think this is something that we confront a little bit because we're, like I mentioned, we're very light on the Nat side of Pet-Nat.

We're kind of stretching that.

But I also see this as the iterations that are gonna tell us how to pull that off with a spontaneous ferment somewhere down the line.

It's something where we're doing spontaneously fermented still wines in parallel with these inoculated Pet-Nats and the more that we learn on both ends of that the closer we get to combining them.

So maybe we're just framing it as selling our R&D and letting you learn with us as we figure this thing out.

As far as SO2 goes, if we have to add SO2 to the juice, it's something that we'll do.

But we're really limited on that.

We don't add SO2 to almost any juice anymore because we're using a lot of non-Saccharomyces yeasts almost across the board in our fermentation.

So it's something where if we have a really rough year and it has to be there, it's there.

But it's not something that we're throwing at too many of our products as it is at the juice stage and Pet-Nat doesn't really give you an opportunity to add it post-fermentation.

So if it's not in there at the juice stage, it's not in there.

Occasionally, when we disgorge them, we'll add a little bit when the bottles are open just to keep them a little fresher, but really, really light doses.

- Anybody else got SO2 thoughts about, especially, the question was they're worrying about preventing in-bottle fermentation.

Like SO2 to the amount that you're not getting your bubbles.

Any of you have concerns about that or is your SO2 generally all pretty low, so that's not a worry?

- We're definitely pretty low going into, I mean it's fermenting so I don't expect to find much in there at all and I make no effort to put it in after fermentation.

That's kind of the whole point of this is you kind of get what you get and we do the preparation up front so that we don't have a bunch of junk going in there that's gonna give us problems, we hope, down the road.

Not always the case, as obviously as I mentioned before.

So there's a chance we take with it, but I think the benefit that comes from just letting her rip on its own has its value.

- So what I think what you're saying, what I'm hearing, what I heard from Phil and from Bob is that you might add some to the juice, but once the fermentation starts, that's the end.

So there's not gonna be any added after that, so.

- [Beth] And Chris, I don't know if you saw in the chat there is a question, what's pretty low?

If people are comfortable sharing their numbers for that juice add, SO2 add?

- Well, I like to add like 30 anyway because it just binds up some aldehydes and gives it a little bit of freshness.

And it's not to prevent something biological happening because this is in the dosage, even if there's no sugar, I personally still like a little bit of sugar or sulfur.

Now, there was a lady at VitiNord who has a winery in Vermont and she said on a panel that she stopped not using sulfur when she couldn't sell her own wine because the VA was so bad, so she's really careful with it now.

And I promised her I wouldn't say who she was and it wasn't Deirdre, the famous Garagista lady, it was somebody else who's made some pretty nice Marquette Pet-Nat and she's careful with sulfur.

But about 30 milligrams per liter is what I like.

- Yeah, I agree with Steve.

When we opt to disgorge a Pet-Nat, we'll often add somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 parts per million just for freshness reasons.

But at the juice stage, I mean it's gonna be dictated by what we see coming in on that fruit.

How much dirt do we have to deal with there?

Can we get away with nothing?

Can we get away under 30, 40 parts per million?

The other option that we have now that we've been playing with here and there is chitosan.

There's other things that we can use to be more selective about the yeast that we have in solution and influence their behavior.

So there's lots of room to experiment, I guess.

- I guess that was gonna be my thought was the alternatives to sulfur are pretty good nowadays.

And so if I'm gonna use sulfur, I'm gonna use an effective dose for what I'm dealing with.

Much like you would use an antibiotic for a human pathogen, you don't undershoot it.

You do what's effective.

So sometimes 40 parts per million is what you need.

Some commercial applications you need 65 at crush because those were machine-picked after a whole bunch of rot and you gotta save the economy for the vineyard.

But ideally, yeah, you use a bioprotectant if you're transporting your grapes, some kind of ambient use that'll just protect the grapes in transport and chitosan is great for knocking down all kinds of different things.

And so there's cool alternatives and so that you know some wines the only SO2 production has come from the ambient natural yeast production, which is under 10.

- [Beth] So, Chris, is it okay if I just kinda?

- Go for it?

- [Beth] Okay yeah so we did, ironically, we just touched on one of the questions about whether people were using chitosan and so that was very helpful.

And then we did have continuing with some of the technical adds and filtering processes.

I guess there was a question about tartrate stability.

You know how much are you, I think we already talked about this some, but do you have a target temperature that you're chilling to or amount of time, you know a week or so for tartrate stabilization?

And I'm gonna just add to that and I was curious if anybody here was using any other kind of stabilizers like CMC or KPA with this at all?

- I was talking to a potential client recently who had some tartrates in their tirage, and we're not talking Pet-Nat now, but I was kind of interested to think that we might try some CMC.

I mean it should riddle out so it shouldn't be a problem, but if maybe some CMC in the dosage.

I don't know, sometimes I like to try things but I really don't work with CMC much because it doesn't pass my tests on stability.

So anyway.

- Other people might have better comments on the refrigeration and stuff like that, but I've never opted for any commercial application for Pet-Nat style of CMC or the stabilizers, 'cause they're really finicky with their own stability and causing turbidity and things.

- Yeah, when we're doing chilling on these tanks, we can get them, oftentimes, we're in tanks that don't have a thermostat control, so it's pretty binary.

They're just gonna be as cold as our glycol system can make them.

And that's one of the other reasons why we like EC-1118 as the inoculated yeast of choice for products like this because it tends to bounce right back.

It's one of those original Champagne strains that you can get really cold and then it wakes up and doesn't cause too much problem.

So that's been our experience.

We've held these tanks for weeks right around 30 Fahrenheit without any issues with the fermentation once we get them back in the bottle.

- I'm not doing anything special in terms of refrigeration.

If the wine gets cold during fermentation because of where it's being stored, that's probably about what it's gonna get.

I'm not putting it into a jacketed tank and chilling.

- [Beth] Bob, I think you muted.

- [Chris] Hit mute after you- - Oh, sorry.

- So we heard you said you're not putting it into a chilling tank- - Okay.

- [Chris] And then, yeah.

- Yeah, okay, and I probably won't just to let it be as natural as possible and find out what's going so.

And as far as CMC and those types of things go, I don't.

I've used them in the past and maybe they work, I don't know.

The idea is that if I'm gonna use them, it's gonna be in a wine that goes out the door and, hopefully, I won't see it again and somebody drinks it fast and I don't trust it long term.

- [Beth] Chris, we have one more question related to gushing.

Gushing has been a hot topic today.

It sounds like that is the struggle.

So one last question for you all about that, which is about sugar, residual sugar.

Do you find, and I don't know the answer to this, do you find that the sugar, residual sugar amount at all controls gushing or I guess correlates to gushing?

- Or yeah, I guess, what roughly could you give a range for where you're going in to a bottle.

rough amount of sugar remaining?

It doesn't have to be what you use every time.

What you might recommend, I guess, or what you think are ranges that are appropriate?

- I think it depends on what your goals are for the finished product.

I know that we're, if we're looking to have something finished all the way dry, sometimes we'll bottle it right in that neighborhood of 20 grams per liter residual and that seems to give us a nice bubble.

But like I mentioned before, occasionally, we leverage pressure to stop fermentation and I've found that with EC-1118 you can exhaust somewhere around 25, 26 grams per liter and that's where it really starts to slow down.

So like we do a Diamond Pet-Nat that we try and land somewhere around 20 grams per liter residual sugar.

So that's typically going in the bottle somewhere between 40 and 45 grams per liter.

- And that stops before it keeps going to the point of blowing the caps?

- That's been my experience so far with those products and it's something that we've done with Riesling too with that particular yeast strain.

Where we get in trouble is where when we deviate from that protocol and try something new, which is why we've gone back to old reliable over and over again.

- And with classic method or transfer method sparkling, we've gone in the dosage up to 30 grams per liter and I've never seen any issue with more gushing with more sugar.

If anything, 30 grams per liter is like 30 mls in a bottle, which is a lot.

So the bubbles are kind of suppressed, if anything, when you're getting really sweet, but that's not probably exactly what you're asking.

But as far as the correlation goes, really sweet doesn't make it worse as far as I can see.

- Great. Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.

I think we're gonna wrap up here.

Parting shots.

Do you have like a your tweet-length thing to say about Pet-Nats philosophically, technically or for the future?

I'll give you each like your your parting shot.

Everybody else please fill out the survey.

Beth put a link in the chat at least once, if not twice.

But thanks again to our panelists.

Thanks to our attendees for listening and thanks, everybody, for being a part of this.

Kyle, what's your parting shot about Pet-Nats?

- Uh, (chuckles) I guess you're in charge of your own roadmap and take it from there.

- Perfect, thank you. Steve.

- Well, it's exciting to be able to work with different things and be respected for it and I like that idea.

And different varieties, totally not only acceptable, but looked up to for trying different things.

One thing about the natural wine movement and Pet-Nats and natural food and organic is, sometimes, I think people make emotional issues out of it and think they have a monopoly on healthy living and I don't know that they have a monopoly on it or anything.

I think sustainability is gonna be pretty important in the future.

You know sustainability in not only our food supply, but in our own bodies and so it's in the right direction.

- Thanks, Steve. Bob.

- I would say that for me, the Pet-Nat is kind of like the perfect way to explore different flavor and styles of wine, or at least that particular style, but to try different flavors in different production and just see what comes out of it.

It's fun and people like it, so why not do it?

- There you go. There's a T-shirt.

All right, thanks.

Phil, what do you got?

- I think I would agree with everybody here that Pet-Nat, we're at a time when sparkling wine is as popular as I've ever seen it and Pet-Nat's a really accessible way to get into that.

And it's a great way to take wild chances for a customer base that wants you to do that.

It's a great way to kind of reinvent yourself as a winemaker for this one little lane.

- Perfect. All right.

Thanks again to all of you for doing this.

Thanks to the attendees. Thanks to organizers.

Molly, is there a gush?

- [Beth] (chuckles) Thanks. Take care.

- [Panelist] Bye.

- Thanks, everyone.