Ok, so the label looks like we've raided the minimarket down the road, and the crown capsule doesn't help, but stay with me here... This is a genuinely fun wine.  It's pink and it's fizzy and it's perfect for enjoying in the sunshine.

It's made from 100% Cinsault which is a red variety that has a thin skin which is perfect for making rose.  Cinsault is also capable of producing fruity and floral aromas and this comes with a wonderfully bright nose of summer fruits and a hint of rose petal.  It's also a variety that has soft tannins which is great for wines designed to be smooth and refreshing and that's exactly what we have here with flavours of summer pudding, a zippy clean finish and that wonderfully fresh sparkle.

Legally this is labelled as Methode Ancestrale but the "Pet-Nat" bit is short for "Petillant-Naturel" and a reference to the fact that the wine is bottled before the first fermentation has finished.  Unlike most sparkling wines Pet-Nats ferment only once (but some of this happens in bottle) and typically have no tirage (yeast & sugar added to trigger a fermentation) and no dosage (sugar added post fermentation).  They tend not to be filtered or disgorged so many be naturally slightly cloudy, although this clearer than it might otherwise be because the winemaker does disgorge in this instance.

Bottling before the fermentation has finished means that there's necessarilly a bit of guesswork involved on the part of the winemaker because they do not have any certainty of when the fermentation will stop and therfore precisely what the pressure of the fizz inside will be in the finished wine.  In South Africa this really matters because the regulations say that anything officially labelled as "Pet Nat" must not exceed 3 Bar of pressure.  As a result the wine is labelled Methode Ancestrale for legal reasons (which is fine if the pressure exceeds 3 Bar) but they've put the Pet Nat bit in brackets afterwards because it's important to flag this up in terms of the style to indicate a wine whose fermentation has been finished in the bottle and which therefore might be a bit naturally cloudy and have a gentler fizz than a wine that's undergone a full secondary fermentation in bottle.  Ok... I'll get my anorak now...but thanks for listening.