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| Wednesday tasting 8/2 from 6 to 8 pm $15 / 10 percent off any wine featured |
| What makes drinking a cold, fizzy pét-nat with friends on a warm summer evening so compelling? The answer lies in the effect of acid on our mouths. The bubbles in a pét-nat are an acid (carbonic acid)—atoms or molecules that have a spare proton or two that they’d like to get rid of. A sip of a fizzy pét-nat is a proton torpedo bombarding your tongue with protons. Try this short experiment to see the effect of protons attacking your tongue and oral mucosa: take a sip of any sort of effervescent mineral water or seltzer and try holding it in your mouth for five seconds before swallowing. Your tongue starts to feel like it’s under fire as the protons attack your mouth meat. That sensation is your papillae crying out to your brain—help, help, we are under attack by protons, can you save us? Your mouth is not defenseless here and has a powerful method for neutralizing protons. When your brain hears your papillae’s plea, it instructs your salivary glands to secrete saliva, washing over your tongue and neutralizing the acid—at least until you take the next sip of wine. This shared physiological response to acid is, I think, one reason it’s gratifying to drink a pét-nat (or any fizzy wine, as long as it is not a sad wine) with friends. We may have little overlap between our individual Venn diagrams, but when we drink a fizzy wine together our mouths mutually respond in the same way (bracketing the poor souls with a pathology that impairs this response). You may be unaware of the physiology at work (and it can be weird and disturbing practice to focus on your mouth and what it’s doing) but our physiological response to the carbonic acid in a pét-nat is identical. You may feel isolated and disconnected due to existential reasons or just the mundane vagaries of neurochemistry, but for a few moments, as we sip a pét-nat together, our Venn diagrams overlap at least in this one way, and things begin to make sense again if just for a brief moment.We’re tasting four pét-nats tonight: white, rosé, orange, and red:
Menti “Roncaie” Vino Frizzante Gambellara/Italy |