'Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!!'

Published on: November 24, 2004

The 2004 Beaujolais Nouveau arrived on US shores yesterday, and while all the marketing hullabaloo of a few years ago seems to have subsided, the arrival of this unique, young wine from France certainly marks as much as anything else the transition from autumn to winter.

The remarkable thing is that Beaujolais Nouveau isn’t even a particularly distinctive wine – closer to the "Two Buck Chuck" variety (though it generally costs between $8 and $9 a bottle) than to the finer French wines we’re familiar with. Unlike most red wines, Beaujolais Nouveau is meant to be served a bit chilled, and is designed to appeal to people who drink a lot of wine. In fact, it’s meant not to be sipped, but quaffed; Franck Duboeuf, who owns the world’s foremost Beaujolais Nouveau producer with his father, Georges Duboeuf, describes it as a "party in a bottle."

Of course, Beaujolais Nouveau is as much a marketing creation as anything else. It is made from hand-picked Gamay grapes grown in the sunny regions near Lyon, in southern Franc; unlike more traditional wines, Beaujolais Nouveau is rushed to market within weeks of the vintage, and what it lacks in distinctive flavors it tends to make up in freshness – it always makes its debut each year at midnight on the third Thursday of November.

These days, of course, any wine from France is hard-pressed to find success in the US. French wines simply aren’t as popular here as they used to be, owing to continued public resentment about France’s lack of support for the War in Iraq. But Beaujolais Nouveau may prove to be the exception - some 56 million bottles will be sold in 150 countries this year, and 20 percent of those sales are expected to take place in the US.

And what of this year’s vintage? We bought a couple of bottles last night, and actually liked it a little bit more than in the past. It has the expected light, fruity taste, with just a hint of strawberry without being cloying. (Some critics thought it had the taste of raspberry and gooseberry, but we only picked up the strawberry.) And unlike past years, it seemed to have a little bit of structure to it, with the flavors staying in the mouth for a bit after the wine has been consumed.

Is it great? No. but that’s almost beside the point. Beaujolais Nouveau offers the opportunity to mark the passage of time, to celebrate the beginning of the holiday season, and creates an excuse to sit with friends and enjoy a bottle of wine.

What can be bad about that?

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