Decades ago, if you said “Beaujolais nouveau” in a crowded theater, you might create a panic: Half the people would be rushing to get some, while the other half would be running to get away from it.
Beaujolais nouveau, the first wine of the year from a small district in France’s Burgundy, is traditionally the nearest thing to grape juice with alcohol. It arrives in late November and is best when it’s all gone before New Year’s Eve.
It once was cause for celebration among wine merchants because it energized the market. After a summer of cooling white wines and roses, partygoers loved this light red. You quaffed it. It appealed to people who wanted to taste Beaujolais nouveau even if they didn’t care a whit about wine.
Beaujolais nouveau signaled that the season to celebrate was imminent. Anything would do, including the release of the new wine. Soon it would be celebrations such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the New Year.
In the other party were serious wine lovers, purists who would say that the first wine of the vintage is merely jug wine, plonk, an utter frivolity with no redeeming social value. It was WINO—wine in name only—for winos.
But festive?! Absolutely. In France decades ago, you would routinely see placards in late November proclaiming, “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive!” Years ago, I figured out that these signs were mainly for tourists.
Mania for nouveau (as it’s called for short) has declined significantly since its heyday when it was feted with Bacchanalian parties at restaurants all over the country. One reason it declined in sales was that the French stopped promoting it.
It was, after all, one of the silliest promotions in the world of wine. At midnight on the third Thursday of November, the French government had decreed, the wine may be shipped to market. So there was a rush of epic proportions to see that it arrived quickly.
Beaujolais companies competed feverishly to be the first to deliver the new one to Perez.
As a result, getting the stuff to market became more important than the wine. Forty years ago, wine experts, many of them self-proclaimed, held wine glasses aloft to examine nouveau’s color while the blood drained from their arms. There were sips, oohs and ahhs, and then the proclamation that the wine was good. It was always good. Never bad.
Not only would French flags fly in cafes and retail stores and wine bars, but special promotions were staged; TV cameras were sent to locations where the first bottles, rushed to market on the Concorde, were opened with a flourish.
It made for good TV, but it had all the importance of Groundhog Day.
And sure, you can still find Beaujolais nouveau, but these days you have to look for it. The most widely available is from the fine producer George Duboeuf. His nouveau has been the market leader for decades.
There’s a very short learning curve to this wine. You basically chill it (yes, a light red wine that you may chill and probably ought to!), you splash some into a glass (any glass will do; wine glasses aren’t mandatory or even necessary), and you slug it down.
You do not take a tiny sip and slosh it around inside your mouth; you do not pontificate on its hedonistic impenetrability. And for heaven’s sake, you do not score it.
Beaujolais nouveau is for gulping.
When it’s consumed young, nouveau has a fresh, fruity aroma of berries and is evanescent. However, if you don’t drink it within a few months, a year at most, you'll pay the consequences in lost fruit. And a nouveau without fruit is a sad experience indeed!
‘Tis the season...
No wine of the week.
