Wine of the Week! 04/15/24

Cambridge Road The Naturalist White Pet Nat

Normally $28.99 / Now on Sale for $19.96
50% Pinot Gris, 50% Sauvignon Blanc (Martinborough wine region)

At one point, Lance Redgwell was splitting his life between ship building and wine making — you know, like you do. Then, in 2006, he and his family turned to New Zealand’s Martinborough wine region and bought an organic vineyard there. Now, an organic vineyard, in and of itself, was a bit of a Martinborough outlier, but Redgwell wasn’t satisfied. He started biodynamically farming grapes there with the goal of making natural New Zealand wines. Today, Cambridge Road grapes are dry farmed and hand harvested. Very little intervention goes on in the winemaking, with Cambridge Road often not even adding any sulfur.

The Pinot Gris and the Sauvignon Blanc for this wine are fermented together with indigenous yeasts. (It’s much more common to ferment different grape varieties separately and then blend them.) After a few days of skin contact, the wine spends eight weeks in stainless steel before finishing its fermentation during eight months spent in the bottle. The natural carbonation of this Pétillant Naturel delivers soft bubbles with a creaminess sitting on top of the wine’s tartness like Granny Smith apples topped with crème fraîche.