August 2025

Dear friends,

When we released our Espumante, I wrote about the curious process of capturing bubbles in winemaking and about the meaning of bottle fermentations. Since in this shipment you have a special Wine Club release, our limited edition Espumante Brut Nature, I’d like to recall some of those ideas and share with you some thoughts about this wine. 

As you probably know, most sparkling wines today are mass-produced. They are made using a method called “forced carbonation,” which consists of forcing CO2 into a pressurized tank, like they do with sodas. Then, with too much sugar and too little character, these cheap sparkling wines invade the shelves of wine stores, like the adult version of sodas. This is the unfortunate story of much of the food and beverage industry, and most products out there follow a similar pattern of production and distribution before arriving at our table. This is why it is important to know your producers and go, whenever possible, directly to the source.

At Casa Carmen, we use a blend of the two best traditional methods to make sparkling wines. Using Méthode Champenoise (the method used for Champagnes and premium Cavas), we ferment our wine twice, first in a stainless steel tank and second in the bottle. This bottle fermentation is the one that, by preventing the CO2 from escaping, captures it into the small and delicate bubbles that make good sparkling wines so sublime. But we are also deeply inspired by Méthode Ancestrale (used to make pétillant naturel wines, also known as pét-nats or natural sparkling wines). With this method in mind, we ferment our wines using native yeasts and do not disgorge or filter them, which allows for an extended aging in the lees and gives them the beautiful character of bright aromatics and a bready body that good sparkling wines should always have.

This approach is wild and uncharted. It is one where “there is no road / only ripples in the sea,” as the Sevillian poet Antonio Machado wrote. After the wine is in the bottle, we can’t have certainty over its evolution or monitor its development.  All we can do is look at the constellation of bacteria and yeasts, at the light of experience, and make the best possible decisions. Like in life, we can’t control every variable, but only the modest influence of our hands, the direction of our steps, and our disposition to the unknown. Yet in those humble tasks we are transformed, like grapes into a natural sparkling wine, and the traits that we bear in our personality, like the characteristics of the wine, are the evidence of the road we’ve traveled: the expression of the seed, the fruit, and the process that made us who we are.

This special edition Espumante Brut Nature is the greatest expression of our success in this process so far. It is bright like the sun in high summer, and its bready body is the road it has forged, the “ripples of its sea.”

We thank you for being part of the Casa Carmen Wine Club family, for walking this unknown road with us, and we thank you for staying close to the source.

Salud,

Enrique