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What’s Bubbling at Arda

 

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The lack of a car and, frankly, funds, means I don’t get to visit wineries around Turkey as much as I’d like. So, it’s a real treat whenever I can make it happen. I was really lucky last November when Fine Turkish Wine was in country and I got to visit all their partner wineries with the founder. That included Arda, where Yavuz took us to see the Papazkarası vineyards he works with, opened pretty much every bottle the winery produces, and treated us to a couple new experiments…including some bubbles.

Arda: a Heart of Experimentation

I’ve made no secret that Arda is one of my favorite wineries. I think they’re wines are seriously underrated and they’re incredibly fairly priced. Maybe that’s why they’re underrated, they’re too “cheap.” The Saç family is also lovely. The brother-sister team behind the winery, Yavuz and Şeniz are talented, willing to take risks, low-key, and just really kind people. 

Let’s talk about that willingness to experiment.

In a world where being in the wine industry is expensive, financially uncertain, unadvertisable, and where even the slightest perceived misstep can get you seriously fined or worse…making wine at all is brave. That’s especially true for those like the Saç family, who look at all this uncertainty and decide that they’re going to risk their harvest and bank accounts by experimenting on wine that may not work.

This willingness to risk it all has served Arda well in the past. Arda’s one of the few wineries playing with co-fermenting wine. One year, Arda released a limited bottling of dry late harvest Merlot that was as near perfection as is possible for Merlot. Not all their experiments make it. The first time I ever visited the winery, Yavuz had been drying bunches of Merlot to attempt an Amarone-style wine. They made it, but it wasn’t ever released commercially. This year, they also tried making an amber Kınalı Yapıncak but the wine succumbed to an overload of volatile acidity towards the end and had to be scrapped. That’s not going to stop them from trying again next year though. 

Arda’s latest success is something for us all to celebrate: they decided to dip their toes into the world of sparkling wine with pét-nat.

Arda Kınalı Yapıncak Pét-Nat, 2025

This is the first time Arda has worked with (Kınalı) Yapıncak and working with it now is a total accident of fate. They stumbled across these 30+ year-old goblet vines while looking in the area for new plots to work with.  

The Arda Kınalı Yapıncak Pét-Nat spent 37 days on the skin, extracting all the lovely phenolics along with color and a touch of tannins. It spontaneously fermented on native yeasts (i.e. the yeasts that live naturally in the vineyards and on the grapes).  They chose to not disgorge the wine, leading to a properly cloudy pét-nat. 

By their nature, pét-nats are semi-sparkling. Several producers in Turkey make wines that barely fizzle and are really only one step left of being still…Arda’s is full-on bubbly. In fact, opening it proved challenging as it went full-on volcanic, foaming out faster than we could pour it. What we could catch in the glasses though…wow. Sparkling wine that’s also tannic is always a little surprise. Flavors of scrumpy cider, quince, marjoram, and dried chamomile lingered as the foam dissipated, momentarily drying out the mouth with tannins before the acidity kicked in for a mouthwatering finish. 

To Disgorge or Not to Disgorge 

To disgorge or not to disgorge is a big question with pét-nat. Some argue that a disgorged wine isn’t “real” pét-nat because that cloudy nature is intrinsic to the style. Disgorging also de-intensifies flavor and bubble. Most pét-nat makers in Turkey disgorge their wine. I have thoughts about the why. There is an argument for why disgorging is practical. The combination of dissolved CO₂ and remaining lees gives the bubbles lots of places to form and grow, so when you open the bottle, the wine can erupt rather than simply fizz.

When trying to find an explanation for that that I could understand, I learned a new word: nucleation. Nucleation is one of those words that useless to look up because all you get is a circular definition. Nucleation = derived from nucleate. Nucleate = having a nucleus. That’s not helpful. Here’s what’s happening:

• Pet-nat retains dissolved CO₂. Because fermentation finishes in the bottle, some of the CO₂ produced by fermentation stays dissolved in the wine under pressure.
• Lees provide nucleation sites. Yeast cells, yeast fragments, proteins, polysaccharides, and other fine particles suspended in the wine give dissolved CO₂ surfaces around which bubbles can form (i.e. a nucleus). In a filtered sparkling wine, there are fewer particles available to initiate bubble formation.
• Opening the bottle causes a dramatic pressure drop. CO₂ becomes much less soluble as pressure falls. It starts coming out of solution as bubbles.
• Those particles can produce a huge number of bubbles simultaneously. Instead of a few bubbles slowly forming at the glass surface, CO₂ can nucleate throughout the wine. The bubbles rise, collide, and create foam.
• Lees can help stabilize the foam. Yeast-derived proteins and polysaccharides make the liquid around the bubbles more resistant to breaking. So you don’t just get CO₂ escaping, you get a persistent mass of bubbles that pushes the wine out of the bottle.

That’s a really detailed explanation to say that sediment exaggerates the pressure in the bottle creating a larger explosion upon opening. This is why a young, heavily leesy, highly carbonated pet-nat can be particularly spectacular when opened.

Temperature matters enormously, too: warmer wine holds less CO₂, so a warm bottle is much more prone to erupting. That’s one reason chilling a pet-nat thoroughly before opening it makes such a difference. Chill the bottle upright in an ice bucket for 30 minutes. The cold keeps sediment at the bottom of the bottle, allowing you both to open the bottle with a less explosive result and the ability to pour four relatively clear glasses.

Arda Cabernet Franc Pét-Nat, 2025

Arda’s no stranger to working with Cabernet Franc. The Kuşlu Cabernet Franc has been part of their line up for years. The vines they work with are a little older than 20 years and, until now, they’ve made only red with it. This year, Arda debuted not only a Cabernet Franc rosé (and we’ll get into that later), but also a rosé pét-nat. 

Like the Kınalı Yapıncak Pét-Nat, the Cabernet Franc fermented spontaneously and went nuclear upon opening. But wow. Wow wow. The cloudy dusky rose-colored wine was perfumed with raspberries, black mulberries, rose sherbet, lokum, and candied popcorn, wrapped up in a herbaceous lining. Wow. 

Unfortunately, you won’t see these in Turkey this year as production was tiny. If you live in Texas though you’re lucky, there’s a small consignment headed to Houston and Fine Turkish Wine as we speak. For the those of us here, we’ll have to wait (im)patiently until next summer and hope that Arda managed to make a commercially viable number of bottles. 

In the meantime, there are quite a few other Turkish pét-nats with which we can slake our needs for bubbles.