Maigret and the Pet Nats

The great — perhaps greatest of all — French actor Jean Gabin (above) is one of many to have played Georges Simenon’s beloved Paris police inspector Jules Maigret on the big screen, and is, for us, the only one to have truly inhabited the character. One of Gabin’s more indelible, though oft overlooked, performances is in the 1935 film “Maigret and the Pet Nats,” an important, early example of the genre that became known as wine noir.

In it, the doughty detective, between meals of his wife’s famously delicious cassoulets, daubes and skate in black butter (“she said she hoped it wasn’t too rich for him”), must solve the mystery of exactly what is, and what is not, a true pétillant naturel — pet nat for short.

We’ll skip the somewhat convoluted plot details and get right to the film’s intriguing denouement in which Maigret learns, by means of his characteristically artful interrogation of a none-too-savory confidential source, that the authentic pet nat is a lowish alcohol, lightly fizzy red, white or pink wine whose modest effervescence is the result NOT of a second fermentation in the bottle provoked by the addition of sugar and yeast, as is practiced in Champagne, but by the simpler technique of bottling wine before its fermentation is quite complete. Yeasts resume their activity in the bottle, consuming whatever remains of the grape sugars. The resulting CO2 gas, trapped in the wine, provides the sparkle.

Never intended to ripen into maturity in some musty cellar, pet nats are simple, thoughtless creatures who want nothing more out of their brief, hectic lives than a good slide down the hatch, quenching thirst and giving life to the party.

In the world of wine, as elsewhere, everything old is new again. And these days pet nats are the coolest things in a bottle. No wine bar with pretentions to hipness can be without a peck of ’em on their lists. But a whiff of mystery still clings to them. How does one really know whether one is dealing with the authentic article or an imposter?  Dear old Maigret had three tests to apply to the problem. You’d do well to follow his lead.

Test no. 1: Is the wine actually fizzy? The first half of the name is, after all, pétillant, meaning lightly sparkling (in Italy it would be frizzante). If your wine doesn’t have a respectable dose of spritz, it can’t be a pet nat. This much is simple and obvious.

Test no. 2. Is the bottle sealed with a crown cap?  Pet nats have low levels of pressure, so there’s no need for the heavy bottles, chunky corks and twisted wire tie-downs you see in Champagnes. Crown caps are also cheap — as it happens — a bonus for the winemaker if his clientèle is receptive to the closure. A crown cap on a pet nat is a little like Maigret’s fedora and pipe. Every hatted pipesmoker is not Maigret; but Maigret himself is never seen in public without these trademark accoutrements.

Test no. 3: Is there schmutz in the bottle? Pet nats are not only simple, they’re a bit crude. They don’t get the complicated tidying up that Champagnes do. They march out into the world accompanied by clouds of the harmless rubbish yeasts produce as they do their work and give up the ghost. True pet nats are never without teltale traces of lees. This is the naturel part of the name.

As Maigret discovers, applying the tests can itself be a little challenging, since, while each of these elements is necessary, no single feature, nor any combination of two, is sufficient to close the case. You have to do the work, but armed with this investigative approach, you need never be in the dark about what is a pet nat and what ain’t.

In all this, let’s not lose sight of the fact that pet nats have no particular edge on pet nots – except, perhaps, as legal tender in the never-ending game of being seen to be thoroughly au courant.