# Beta: our chillable red, a small fish with a big personality By Dan Person, winemaker and co-founder at Carboniste. Published 2026-10-30. Canonical page: https://carboniste.com/blog/the-beta-a-chillable-red-wine ![A bottle of 2024 Carboniste Beta chillable red beside a galvanized ice bucket and a bowl of plums on a sunny deck table, with a glass of light red wine and friends gathered around](https://carboniste.com/images/blog/p14-beta-dock-v4-2400.webp) **The short answer:** a chillable red is a light, fresh red wine that tastes best with a little chill on it. Our **Beta** is one. It's a blend of Pinot Noir, Gamay Noir and a little Primitivo, made to be bright, fruitful and light on tannin instead of oaky, ripe and heavy. It's the red a sparkling winemaker wants to drink. ## Why a sparkling house makes a still red Like everything we do at Carboniste, we make the Beta to follow our passion. There's plenty of still red wine made in California, but I don't think this style is represented completely or sufficiently. The Beta is my homage to the fresh table wines of Europe. Too often in California, we make cheap wines that are trying to taste expensive. The Beta goes the other way. It's meant to be fresh, bright and fruitful. It tastes like grapes, like the essence of those vineyards and that vintage. It's not oaky and it's not ripe. It's fresh and herbal and fruitful instead. ## Pinot Noir and Gamay: passe-tout-grains The French have a name for this kind of blend: *passe-tout-grains*. In Burgundy, growers who farmed Pinot Noir and Gamay Noir side by side would put both parcels into the same fermenter, the same barrel, the same wine. Pass all the grapes. Put them all in the same place. I like that idea. The two grapes make really nice blending partners. Pinot can be a bit serious, and Gamay can be a bit fun. So it's a counterpoint: sweet and savory, structure and flesh. The first time we made it, in 2023, I wasn't planning a blend at all. I was making some Gamay and some Pinot Noir. The Pinot was beautiful and delicious, a heady, bright, energetic wine, but it wasn't complete on its own. The Gamay brought it back down to earth. It added some earthiness, some sweetness of fruit and some body, and the blend was a lot better than either wine by itself. The 2024 is 40% Pinot Noir from Carriger Vineyard in Sonoma, 40% Gamay Noir from Nights in White Satin Vineyard in Napa Carneros, and 20% Primitivo from Vittorio Vineyard in Redwood Valley, which adds a little fresh citrus. Because it blends sites from different appellations, the label just says California. That's on purpose. Our goal for every wine is to make the best possible wine, and sometimes that means blending varieties, vintages or places. ## Pressed early, like steeping tea The grapes start as whole clusters under carbon dioxide for a week, the way I like to start a red, then ferment on their skins and stems for about five days. Then we press early. You'll see the phrase "pressed slightly sweet" on our product page. That's winemaker shorthand for pressing before the fermentation has finished, so the wine spends less time on its skins and picks up less tannin. It's like making herbal tea. Steep it for a while and it's pretty and bright and fresh. But there's an inflection point, and if you keep steeping past it, the tea gets over-extracted, rough and coarse, and you lose the delicacy. Grapes do the same thing. Over-extract them and they go from pretty and delicate to heavy and coarse. There's room for every style, but I prefer the herbal tea to the overwrought, over-extracted version. After pressing, the wine rests eight months in neutral barrels, and we bottle it without fining or filtering. ## Why you chill a red A little chill brings out the fruit. Here's how I actually drink it at home. The first night, I serve it at cellar temperature. If I don't finish the bottle, it goes in the fridge overnight, and the next day it tastes great straight out of the fridge. The French have a saying for that: the wine spent a good night in the fridge. It's well chilled, and it's also more expressive because it's been open for a day. Here's the strange part. With this wine, I often like it even better when it's been open for a week. That's not how most wines behave. ## Small fish, big personality A betta is one of the smallest fish you can keep as a pet. It needs almost nothing: you feed it, and that's about it. But it acts like a big fish. It has these beautiful, flamboyant fins and a personality that's much bigger than its body, which I find funny and kind of admirable. The wine is the same. On paper it's simple: young Pinot Noir and Gamay, the kind of thing people in France think of as an ordinary table wine. I think it's special. It's fresh and expressive, with pretty floral, earthy and fruity character. That gets undervalued because it isn't rich or opulent. But it is pretty, it's very expressive, and it's flamboyant in its own way. ## If you mostly drink white or rosé This is your red. It's not sweet or oaky or heavy. It's fresh and fruitful and bright, the way you'd expect a white wine or a rosé to be. If you've been waiting for a red that drinks like the wines you already love, start here. ## When to open it Our wines are generally Wednesday night wines, and the Beta is for any day of the week. Fridays are a little tricky, because it's so yummy to me that I want to drink a lot of it. It's very easy to indulge in. The tannins are light, so it's flexible at the table. It goes well with food that has some fat, like a burger, a pizza or barbecue, and it can just as easily go with grilled fish or lighter dishes. One of my favorite moments for it is a hot day outside with burgers on the grill and a Beta that's been in the fridge. There's more of that in [my everyday pairing guide](/blog/sparkling-wine-food-pairing). **The one thing to remember:** small fish, big personality. It's a light red wine with lots of flavor, and it's more impressive than you'd expect from the style. [Meet the Beta](/products/beta-chillable-red) ## Quick answers **What is a chillable red wine?** A light, fresh red with low tannin that tastes best a little cool. Pinot Noir and Gamay are classic grapes for it. **Should you put red wine in the fridge?** A light red like the Beta, yes. Serve it a little cool, between fridge and cellar temperature, and an open bottle keeps well in the fridge for days. **What does passe-tout-grains mean?** It's a French term for a Burgundy blend of Pinot Noir and Gamay, historically grown and fermented together. Literally: "pass all the grapes." **Is the Beta sparkling?** No. The Beta is one of our still wines, made by a sparkling winemaker who loves a fresh red. --- Wines in this post: [Beta Chillable Red](https://carboniste.com/products/beta-chillable-red)