Serenada is a beautiful estate in the Alentejo that has been in winemaker Jacinta Sobral’s family for more than three centuries. Her father planted the first vines in 1961, the year Jacinta was born, so she affectionately calls them her sisters.
Driven by an adventurous spirit, Jacinta is constantly experimenting with new ways to create truly distinctive wines. Her wines aged 15 meters below the surface of the sea have attracted considerable attention, but Serenada’s portfolio offers many other treasures waiting to be discovered.
Among them is a seductive Pet Nat made from Touriga Nacional. The grapes are gently pressed, much as they would be for a rosé, but the wine is bottled before fermentation is complete. Fermentation then continues inside the bottle, trapping the carbon dioxide it naturally produces and giving the wine its delicate sparkle. Hence the name pétillant naturel, French for naturally sparkling, affectionately shortened to Pet Nat.
This style is probably close to how the earliest sparkling wines were made, before the development of the méthode champenoise, in which a finished dry wine undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle after the addition of yeast and sugar.
Making a consistently pleasurable Pet Nat requires considerable precision. Jacinta experimented with bottling at different densities, which indicate how much fermentable sugar remains, until she found precisely the balance she wanted.
To preserve the wine’s natural character, Jacinta adds no sulfites and does not disgorge it—a process in which the yeast sediment is collected in the neck of the bottle, frozen and expelled. As a result, the wine contains some yeast sediment, as well as harmless tartrate crystals: tiny crystalline deposits sometimes known as “wine diamonds.”
The wine comes in a bottle adorned with a whimsical label designed by Catarina Fuschini. Its pale rosé color is alluring, while the palate is fresh, lively and playful. “It is like a ballet for the palate,” says Jacinta. We call it a party in a bottle.
Having mastered the art of Pet Nat, she is already moving on to her next experiment: fermenting the wine in amphora, bottling it before fermentation is complete, and then aging it in the ocean. We can’t wait to taste the result!
Serenada is located near Grândola in Alentejo. Click here for their website.
