
2020
Region
Ukraine › Odesa Oblast
Type
white · traditional · sparkling · brut-nature
Grapes
Chardonnay
Alcohol
12%
Volume
750 mL
Disgorged
2025-07-03
On lees
48 months (4 years)
Available at
Better than the fresh Pinot Noir release - the extra post-disgorgement time clearly helped this one. Baked cheese, baked pears, pineapple, a bit creamy. Interesting bitter edge in the finish, somewhere between grapefruit pith and crushed apple seeds - couldn't decide if I liked it or not, so just noting it. Fresh, a touch perfumed, slightly short, not super complex - the outcast of the lineup but still a neat bottle.
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.