Chardonnay Traditional Method Brut Nature 48 months

This is Frumushika-Nova's traditional-method Chardonnay - a blanc de blancs from the Bessarabian steppe, fermented and bottled by méthode champenoise and aged forty-eight months on lees before disgorgement in July 2025. Brut nature: no dosage at disgorgement, so what reaches the glass is what the base wine and the long lees autolysis produced.

The Chardonnay sits in the producer's broader low-intervention register - hand harvest, native ferment, no preservatives in the natural-wine line. Forty-eight months on lattes is long for any sparkling outside Champagne and signals the producer's interest in the brioche-and-pastry register that yeast autolysis brings, not just the freshness route.

The base wine was harvested in 2020 - before the February 2022 invasion - and the bottles spent the next four-plus years on lees through wartime, on the Tarutyne steppe near the Moldovan border in Odesa Oblast. That the disgorgement happened in 2025, as planned, is part of the wine's context.