Natty Wine 101
Natural Wine Styles
🍊 Wines - The O.G. Natty
Although now trendy, orange wine originated over 8,000 years ago in the modern-day country of Georgia, where winemakers made wine in large, underground ceramic vessels called Qvevris.
This underground process kept the wine cool & created longer fermentations - which meant more time spent with the grapes’ skin. When winemakers unburied the Qvevris, they found their white wines had absorbed the grapes’ skin color! Locals fell in love with these fuller bodied, more tannic “orange” wines & the rest was history.
Chill Your Reds - Trust Us 🍷
Not all red wines are equal. Some styles are perfect for a chill. The below have Unrooted’s “chill me” recommendation…
Carbonic Maceration: A style where instead of crushing grapes, winemakers leave them whole. Each grape ferments from the inside out & explodes with juice once finished. This style minimizes color & tannin extraction, resulting in a light bodied, low tannin wine that does great with a chill.
Light Skinned Grapes: Some red grapes are lightly pigmented & don’t have a lot of tannins and can sit in the fridge next to your white wine. If it’s the color of a light Pinot Noir – chill it!
“Siller” Style: Love reds & whites? Blend them together! “Siller” style wines are a mix of red & white grapes harvested at different times to achieve the perfect blend. They’re then fermented together and produce a wine that’s somewhere between a rose, a white & a red.
Pet Nat - Punk Rock Bubbles 👩‍🎤
PĂ©tillant-Naturel (Pet Nat) predates Champagne by hundreds of years! Back in 1531, Monks in France bottled and corked fermenting wine in the winter, when the yeast cells were cold & inactive.
Come summer, those yeasts reactivated and fermented the remaining sugars - creating CO2 as a natural by product. This CO2 would be trapped in the bottle & cause the wine to sparkle!
So, unlike Champagne, where winemakers take a wine that has finished fermenting and add sugar to the bottle, natty winemakers prefer the original approach to bubbles – bottle a wine mid fermentation & see what happens.
Some Pet Nats have a slight spritz, while others explode out of the bottle – so open carefully!
Some Of Our Favorites…
