Pét-nat is an abbreviation for "pétillant naturel"—a French term that roughly translates to "naturally sparkling."

Maybe you already knew that. After all, pét-nat has been hip for a few years now; all the cool kids are drinking it. But even if you've sampled a few bottles of the stuff, you'd be forgiven for not knowing exactly what qualifies as pét-nat, or how these sparkling wines differ from other types of bubbly.

How Pét-Nats Are Made

"Pét-nat is a wilder version of a sparkling wine like Champagne," says Jared Brandt, owner of Berkeley, California's Donkey & Goat Winery, which has produced pét-nat since 2010. "When people ask, I tell them pét-nat is a wine that we bottle during initial fermentation, and the sugars from the grapes provide the bubbles."

As you may know, during alcohol fermentation, yeasts eat sugar. The byproducts of this process are alcohol and carbon dioxide. In non-sparkling wines—your Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, etc.—most or all fermentation occurs before bottling, so there is no trapped C02, and therefore no bubbles.

Pét-Nat vs. Champagne

Traditional Champagne (and other sparkling wines like Crémant and Cava) are made by combining one or more still dry wines—basically, finished wines that have already undergone fermentation—with a small amount of yeast and sugary liqueur. This combination is bottled and aged, and the yeast eats the sugar in the liqueur. This second, in-bottle fermentation produces the trapped carbon dioxide that gives these sparkling wines their bubbles. (Prosecco and other less-expensive sparkling wines often undergo secondary fermentation in large tanks, rather than in bottles. In some cases, C02 is simply pumped into a finished wine before bottling.)

"Pét-Nat is like a junior version of this really complicated Champagne process," says Steve Hall, co-owner of Spencer, a restaurant and natural-wine shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rather than blending different dry wines and putting them through a second round of fermentation and aging, pét-nat is bottled while still undergoing its first round of fermentation. The French call this process "methode ancestral," and it's likely been around far longer than other, more complex methods of producing sparkling wine.

Heid, Markham (2020). What Exactly is a Pét Nat? Sourced from https://tinylink.net/ARTSB