Get to know: Lost in a Field, Frolic Pet Nat

Tasting Note

We’re very happy to have secured a limited amount of the latest vintage of this exciting new pt-nat wine from (Master of Wine) Tim Wildman’s Lost in a Field project. The wine is ablend of 14 heritage grape varieties from vineyards infive English counties. With this fruit they have created a brightly coloured, naturally hazy sparkling wine with exotic aromas of red current and wild strawberry lead to a featherlight body and a gentle mousse that is soft and foaming with creamy flavours of rhubarb and gooseberry fool. Fresh as a dew-picked-daisy, perfect summer sipping, drink the rainbow! Fruity, fault free, zero sulphur English pt-nat made from heritage grape varieties from old vines.

Enjoy this on its own with friends and light nibbles.

Producer Info

Lost in a Field is on a mission to rescue the fast disappearing heritage grape varieties planted in the UK in the last century and to craft them into delicious, low intervention pt-nat using traditional winemaking methods. Established by Tim Wildman MW in 2021 helped by Darcy Gander (vineyard) and Daniel Ham (winery).

The 2022 Lost in a Field Frolic pt-nat is a blend of 14 heritage grape varieties from five vineyards in five different English counties; Herefordshire, Devon, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Kent Madeleine Angevine 60% Reichensteiner 30% Triomphe dAlsace 2% Schnburger 2% Rondo 2% 9 other heritage varieties 4% Whites: Bacchus, Huxelrebe, Ortega, Madeleine Sylvaner, Siegerrebe, Seyval Blanc, Phoenix, Reds: Dornfelder, Leon Millot

The growing popularity of heritage varieties meant that they lost a couple of vineyards theyd taken fruit from the previous year as the growers had decided to keep the grapes for their own brands.

Fruit from their five vineyards was hand picked between 30th September and 3rd October 2022. The smaller parcels were basket pressed at BSixTwelve in Hampshire and the larger parcels delivered to Defined Wine in Canterbury, Kent. The must was transferred to a 2500 litre tank where co-fermentation with wild yeasts of all fourteen varieties began after a week. After eight days we dropped the temperature of the tank to encourage the wine to become tartrate stable, after which we racked the wine of its gross lees and tartrate crystals, which reduces the risk of the final wine gushing when opened. Fermentation continued slowly as temperatures dropped and the wine was bottled by hand on 23rd February 2023 when the residual sugar was around 12 g/L which would hopefully ferment dry leaving a pressure of just under 3 bar.

They bottled the wine into 2920 bottles and 172 magnums. As temperatures rose in the Spring the wine continued to ferment, they tasted samples every month and decided that by early April the wine had successfully fermented and the flavours had transformed from raw juice to wine. May was then spent arranging labels and waxing the magnums ready for release on June 12th 2023, eight months after the grapes were picked.

Fermented with natural yeasts and without minimal sulphur dioxide.

Free SO2 0g/L Total SO2 9g/L