WINE OF THE WEEK: Alma 4 Phos Pet Nat 2025, Mendoza, Argentina

£12, Tesco

Finding a sparkling wine to appeal to drinkers of Champagne, Prosecco, Crémant, Cava and traditional-method sparkling wines from England, South Africa, Australia et al is quite a tall order, but I think Phos Pet Nat could do exactly that, as long as the drinkers are open-minded.

Pet nat wines (aka pét nat or pétillant naturel) are trendy and usually a bit of a niche taste, liked primarily by natural wine drinkers and those who like anything as long as it’s not mainstream, but this Argentinian pet nat is a crowd pleaser.

Pale yellow, softly fizzy and softly textured with gentle, pithy citrus fruit, Alma 4 Phos Pet Nat 2025 is deliciously approachable, dry and refreshing – and non-conformist.

It might surprise you to learn that it’s made from Chardonnay. You can’t get much more mainstream than Chardonnay, but it’s the way it acquires its bubbles that sets it apart from other sparkling wines, whether Champagne-style or a cheap, simple method like Prosecco.

The other name for pet nat is méthode ancestrale (or rurale), a practice as old as the word ancestral suggests. The wine is bottled and sealed – often, as here, with a crown cap – before it has finished fermenting. It then completes fermentation in the bottle, producing a wine with gentler bubbles, i.e., less fizzy.

What’s behind the name? Alma 4 is the name of the producer, a partnership of four friends who met aged 17 at winemaking school in Mendoza in the 1990s and phos is the ancient Greek word for light.

Phos Pet Nat 2025 would take a wide variety of party canapés in its stride, especially fish and vegetarian, and it also goes well with burrata and light salad starters, including seafood. 12%

Alma 4 Phos Pet Nat 2025, Maipú, Mendoza, Argentina

£12, Tesco (there are 25% off offers with Clubcard until 18.12.25)

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