Nouveau Beaujolais Time: Close to a Miracle

One of the silliest and most fun times of the year for real wine lovers is mid-November, when the first wine of the harvest--Beaujolais Nouveau--is released.

The release of this wine in France, which occurred last Thursday, annually coincides with the American Thanksgiving. And it’s pure coincidence that Nouveau Beaujolais is the perfect wine for the traditional turkey dinner.

That’s because tradition calls for the dinner plate to have on it such things as yams and cranberry sauce, and outside of a few sparkling wines (which are pretty expensive), I can think of no better wine than the newest Beaujolais to accompany it. (It also goes great with ham.)

And this is a time when you’ll hear a lot about the Nouveau Beaujolais. In restaurants and wine shops

across the land, promotions are staged in which the just-released Beaujolais Nouveau is served by the glass. The wine that just a few weeks ago was still juice inside the grape now is being poured with gusto.

I say this is a silly time of year because of all the fuss that’s made over this quaffing wine. It’s a little much to consider: people are shipping quaffing wine by air-freight around the globe.

But it’s a lot more fun than those scenes of wine that we see in the Foster’s beer commercial, where Paul Hogan looks back over his shoulder at a bunch of puffed-up snobs doing a wine tasting.

And it’s true that a lot of the formal wine tasting experience is pure nonsense. “Experts” hold their glasses aloft to ponder the color of the wine until the blood has drained from their arms. They take ever-so-little sips of the precious nectar and close their eyes, rolling the stuff around in their mouths and sucking in air in a disgusting manner.

Then they smack their lips like 5-year- olds with Jujubes. And spit.

It’s enough to put one off one’s breakfast.

What wine really ought to be about is drinking it with a meal. Enjoying a pleasant beverage and then getting on with the rest of your life. It is rarely worth pontificating over. Never have I had a bottle of wine that exceeded the other more obvious ecstasies of life and love.

Ah, but mid-November is when the real wine lovers’ wine comes to market. This Beaujolais is intended not to be spoken of only in hushed tones; it is wine not to be placed on an ivory pedestal, or crystal, and worried over. It is wine not to be reverentially blessed by the nearest person of the cloth and then stashed in a cellar until the buyer is moldering.

Nouveau Beaujolais time is a time of merry-making and joyous appreciation of what the recent exhausting harvest has brought. And true wine lovers enjoy this wine not because it is great or special, but because it is the closest thing we have to a miracle.

Beaujolais Nouveau (the terms are transposed in French) has long been a staple in the French culture. For decades it was served without fanfare in cafes in the Beaujolais district and often was called merely vin de table. This is the house wine. (In France, there is no such thing, for all practical purposes, as a “house white wine.” Some 90% of the wine consumed in France is red.)

Unlike the inexpensive “Burgundy” wines we make in this country that are often heavy in color and indistinct in fruit aroma, the vin de table of France is usually light in color and light in body. And when the aroma is heady with strawberry, cherry and pomegranate, likely as not it is Beaujolais.

For the longest time, there was rarely any ritual attached to this table wine. It was brought to the table in a cheap (often not sterilely clean) carafe. The name of the producer usually wasn’t emblazoned in gold; in fact, it was nowhere to be seen. This is because the French don’t take their wine “seriously”; they merely drink it often.

To the French, this wine is a beverage, not an “experience.” They drink it at lunch time, and before dinner, and with dinner, and as a late-night snack accompaniment and on picnics; and they make excuses to drink it at other times too. It is just as happy in a water glass as a Waterford.

(Which is one reason why France’s per capita wine consumption rate is roughly 10 times what it is in the United States.)

By French decree, the wine called Beaujolais Nouveau or Beaujolais Primeur may not be sold before midnight before the third Thursday of November. (The date used to be Nov. 15, but sometimes this didn’t coincide with the best public relations efforts, so it was changed to a day when the weekend frivolity could be counted on.)

As the first wine of the new vintage, this wine is made to be quaffed fresh and young. It may not be

the absolute prototype of what the French region of Beaujolais offers with its better wines, but it gets wine on the market and it sets the tone for what is to come.

That is to say, Beaujolais is uncomplicated. It has a fresh, fruity aroma of berries (pick your favorite berry), and it can be chilled (the only red that cries out for a slight chilling). This appeals to Americans (we drink every beverage colder than the rest of the world), and it should be gulped rather than cherished.

Indeed, the wine likely as not will die an agonizing death before our very eyes if not consumed within months, perhaps weeks, of its birth.

When James Thurber referred in one of his classic cartoons to an “unpretentious little wine,” it had to be Beaujolais he was talking about.

So there, the truth: it is sacrilegious to submit Nouveau Beaujolais to the indignities of pomp and ceremony. Labels on bottles mean little for this fun-loving member of the bourgeoisie. Just pour the wine and laugh.

So, alas, you see what has happened? The world is getting just as silly about this frivolous little beverage as it gets about Tiffany, Cartier, Rolls, Gucci, Chanel, Lafite and the rest of the show crowd.

Beaujolais has gone uptown.

The game in the last decade or so has been to be the first to taste the new vintage. How this race to market developed no one is quite sure, but what has evolved is a contest in transportation.

At first, it was fine to be one of those who could serve the new wine by 11 a.m. on its release date in a cafe in Lyon or on the Left Bank. Someone would say that it was a good year or a mediocre year and that would be that.

But somewhere along the way, someone got the idea that the first wine of the vintage actually reflects how the harvest went for every region (not true, of course), and the myth spread: sip a Nouveau Beaujolais and declare how great all the wine from that year will be.

It was a harmless little assertion, but that led to “The Great Race to Market,” a practice that recently has become far greater than the sum of its parts. By 1970 or so, everyone had to be the first to sip the Nouveau, to thus be in position to declare the quality of the vintage.

And thus has grown up the tradition of sending wine out at precisely midnight before the third Thursday of November to be the first to market. This, heaven help us, brought the public relations people into the game. Each one tries to create the most showy, flashy method of getting the simple little beverage to market.

A couple of years ago, not content to send a jetliner laden with the stuff to Paris at precisely midnight the day before, someone got the idea that it would be better to send it to Paris by hot-air balloon.

That led, the following year to someone delivering it to a restaurant in Paris at 8 a.m. by jumping out of a plane and parachuting to the street below filled with people waiting with empty glasses. (Unfortunately, the fellow was carrying just one bottle.)

One year, a San Diego hotel chartered a plane from Lyon and flew in 100 cases of Georges Duboeuf Nouveau Beaujolais, pulling the cork on the first bottle at 8 a.m. before civic dignitaries, the television cameras and a buffet of food that stretched 100 feet.

Not to be outdone, Creston Manor, the San Luis Obispo County winery, delivered its Nouveau-style wine to a Beverly Hills hotel in a horse-drawn stagecoach. And the Cafe de Paris in New York once chartered a team of Alsatian Huskies to deliver the wine from the airport to the restaurant.

The national chain of TGI Friday’s Inc. restaurants once arranged with the French government to be able to ship 3,000 cases of Nouveau so it could be served at 12:01 a.m. on the 20th at all of its 135 restaurants in 33 states. (TGI Friday’s, recognizing the carafe nature of the stuff, once announced its Beaujolais festival by sending out hundreds of glass carafes to newspapers. Emblazoned in red, white and blue on each carafe was its announcement of the new wine.)

Curiously, all this hype has actually made some of the Nouveau Beaujolais better than it’s ever been. Some years ago Nouveau Beaujolais was not a wine most major French producers were particularly proud of, but when they realized that by making a wine in this style they could sell it fast, the phrase “cash flow” lit up their eyes.

That prompted such houses as Schieffelin, Barton & Guestier (B & G), Mommesin, Duboeuf and many others to not only make larger and larger quantities of the Nouveau each year, but to participate in this race every year too. And the involvement of such prestigious properties has meant better wine.

The craze to drink the first wine of the vintage hit California a few years ago and now at least a dozen wineries in this state make a Nouveau Beaujolais. Two of the best and most popular are from Charles Shaw and Robert Pecota, both Napa Valley wineries that make an increasing amount of it each year and sell every last drop to their wholesale chain in advance.

To their credit, though, the Californians take a much less silly attitude about delivery of it. This year, in fact, Shaw actually shipped his wine to market two weeks ago.