Wine 101: Wine, Explained Well

A pét-nat, short for pétillant naturel, is a sparkling wine bottled before its first and only fermentation has finished, so the carbon dioxide from that fermentation is trapped inside the bottle. It has one fermentation where Champagne has two, nothing added to sweeten it, a crown cap instead of a cork and cage, and it is usually cloudy because the lees, the yeast left behind by fermentation, are never removed.

Grower Champagne is Champagne made by the family that farmed the grapes, rather than by a house that bought them in. The two letters in the fine print say which: RM, récoltant-manipulant, is a grower making wine from their own vineyards; NM, négociant-manipulant, is a house buying fruit. The method is identical. What changes is that a grower's wine comes from one village's parcels and moves with the vintage, where a house blends across the region to hold a style steady.

Crémant is French sparkling wine made by the same traditional method as Champagne, with a second fermentation inside the bottle, but in a French region that is not Champagne. There are eight crémant appellations: Alsace, Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Die, Jura, Limoux, Loire and Savoie. Each uses its own region’s grapes, every bottle is hand-harvested in whole bunches, and the minimum ageing on the lees is nine months against fifteen for non-vintage Champagne.

Champagne is a sparkling wine made only in the delimited Champagne region of northeast France, by starting a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle and ageing the wine on its lees for at least 15 months. Three grapes do almost all of it: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier. The name is a protected place rather than a style, so the same method used anywhere else must be called something else.

Prosecco col fondo is Prosecco that finishes fermenting inside the bottle it is sold in and keeps its lees, the yeast left behind by fermentation, instead of filtering them out. The name is Veneto dialect for “with the bottom”, meaning the sediment in the base of the bottle. It is dry, softly fizzy at under 2.5 atmospheres, almost always Glera, sealed with a crown cap, and also labeled sui lieviti or rifermentato in bottiglia.

Sulfites are sulfur dioxide and its salts, used in wine as a preservative against oxidation and unwanted microbes. Every wine contains some, because yeast produces sulfites during fermentation, so sulfite-free wine does not exist. EU law caps total sulfur dioxide at 150 mg/l for dry red and 200 mg/l for dry white and rosé; US law caps it at 350 ppm for every style, and requires a “contains sulfites” declaration above 10 ppm. Sulfite sensitivity is real but presents as asthma, not as a headache.