Saint Clair Pét Nat 2024
£16.75
The wine
A delightfully crisp and refreshing gently sparkling wine, with layered notes of fresh green apple, white stone fruits, a delicate hint of citrus and elegant lees influence.
Pet nat is short for petillant naturel, and the method predates Champagne by centuries: the wine is bottled before its first fermentation has finished, so the remaining sugar produces the bubble in the bottle with nothing added. It is typically bottled unfiltered and with a crown cap. Grüner Veltliner, Pinot Gris and Riesling make an aromatic base and give a gentler, softer fizz than a traditional-method sparkler.
The producer
Saint Clair
View all Saint Clair winesNeal and Judy Ibbotson planted their first vines in Marlborough in 1978, when the region had barely a handful of growers and no reputation whatsoever. For sixteen years they sold their fruit to others. Saint Clair Family Estate was founded in 1994, named after James Sinclair, the pioneer who first drained and farmed the land they had bought.
The estate now owns around 160 hectares across ten separate Marlborough locations, chosen deliberately for how different they are from one another. The Wairau valley floor, the cooler and windier Awatere to the south, and the hillside sites in between all ripen at different rates and give quite different wines from the same grape.
That variation is the point of the Pioneer Block series. Rather than blending everything into one house style, individual parcels are bottled and numbered separately, so Block 1 Foundation, Block 3 43 Degrees and Block 14 Doctor's Creek can be tasted against one another. Few producers anywhere offer so clear a demonstration that Marlborough is not one flavour, and the wines have collected an extraordinary run of trophies doing it.
