<i> Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Termine</i>

Pierre Ferraud remembers the worst times of Beaujolais, the days, not so many years ago, when the region was considered a poor cousin in the family of France’s wine-producing territories.

Back then, hardscrabble farmers in the region’s south, near Lyon, produced what the French call a “little wine”--a fruity, light wine made in the fall and immediately sold in Lyonnais cafes. It was hardly worth aging. Here in the north, skirting far more prestigious Burgundy, Beaujolais’ Gamay growers made a few wines considered solid enough to keep around a few months or even a couple of years. Outdoor boules players liked the wines to help cut the chill on their winter pitches--and the local stuff was much cheaper than big-shouldered Burgundies.

Beaujolais itself was poor and tough. “If you scraped together enough money for a new vat,” says Ferraud, one of France’s most respected Beaujolais makers, “the baker and the grocer were on the phone asking for their checks.”

That was before the Beaujolais nouveau phenomenon. By the middle of the 1980s, wine producer and marketing genius Georges Duboeuf had made the new wine of the region the adopted symbol of a wine-drinking generation. He mastered the logistics necessary to deliver 60-million bottles of wine worldwide in just four days, enabling bistros from Brisbane to Burbank to sport mid-November signs proclaiming, “ Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive .”

Overnight, the Beaujolais region was booming. Swimming pools suddenly appeared next to vineyard cottages. Simple farmers developed a fondness for fancy German and Italian cars. Trendy boutiques vied for space on the main street of Villefrance-sur-Soane, the rustic Beaujolais regional capital. “ Le Beaujolais nouveau riche est arrive, “ was the cynical joke of the day.

Because they could easily sell all the wine they produced, growers crowded their fields with vines until the region was the most densely planted in France. To raise the alcohol content of their wines so that they could travel better, they added beet sugar to the natural sugars of the grape. To pay for the swimming pools and the new cars, they raised prices to new heights, including a whopping 36% increase in 1989.

“The problem was,” says Ferraud, one of the wine makers who protested the greedy ways of the Beaujolais boomers, “people lost the notion of quality because they sold everything they made--good or bad.”

Then, just as suddenly as it began in the early 1980s, the Beaujolais boom began to wane in 1990. Consumers, particularly in France, which accounts for about half of the market, began to object to the heady, overly strong effects of the recent Beaujolais. Crusading wine writers exposed the widespread practice of “chaptalization” (adding sugar).

“Beaujolais nouveau is a dead duck,” says Steven Spurrier, an English expert on French wines. “As a result of sloppy habits of overproducing and making generally pretty boring stuff, it’s lost its zing and nobody cares about it anymore.” Between 1989 and 1991, overseas exports dropped precipitously: down 28% in the United States, down 10% in Britain, down more than 50% in Japan, once considered the best new market for Beaujolais nouveau.

Today, the Beaujolais region is in a profound slump. It still produces the same amount of wine--the equivalent of 180 million bottles annually. But the prices, which peaked in France in 1989 at about $4 to $5 for a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau , have fallen through the floor, dipping as low as $1.50 a bottle in some French retail shops.

According to some industry estimates, as many as 15% of the Beaujolais farmers face bankruptcy at the end of this year. Several meetings of grape growers, angered at the sudden fall in market prices, have ended in fistfights. Wholesalers and bankers speak of a market “restructuring” in which only the strongest will survive.

Michel Rougier, an official with the Union Interprofessionelle des Vins du Beaujolais, outlines several reasons behind the crisis in Beaujolais.

First and most important were the “exaggerated prices” demanded by growers beginning in 1989. Then there was the general decline in alcohol consumption in France. In 1957, the French drank an average of 34 gallons of common table wine per capita; today it is less than 14 gallons. And finally, says Rougier, France has lost the monopoly it once held over high-quality wine. “The consumer began to understand that, with fine wines being produced in Napa Valley and Australia, France was no longer considered the reference point.”

To face up to the changed market, Beaujolais wine industry leaders have begun a new campaign that will emphasize the higher-quality wines of the region, the Beaujolais Village wines and the Beaujolais crus --Brouilly, Julienas, Moulin-a-Vent, Saint-Amour, Chiroubles, Morgon, Chenas and Fleurie. They will deemphasize Beaujolais nouveau, which accounts for only a third of the region’s production.

At the same time, winemakers deny that the Beaujolais nouveau days are over. “Beaujolais nouveau is made with the same passion and care as a Chateau Margaux or a Romanee-Conti,” says Duboeuf, the self-crowned “King of Beaujolais,” in the midst of preparations for the Nov. 19 launch of this year’s Beaujolais nouveau.

His sprawling office complex in Romaneche-Thorins resembles a staging area for a major army campaign. Secretaries man phone banks taking orders. Huge trucks mass on the narrow streets of the town. Duboeuf says he plans to personally escort the first bottles of the new wine to New York in a Concorde jet.

America, says Rougier hopefully, is a target. With the election of Bill Clinton, winemakers hope that youth and young wines may come back in fashion. After all, says Rougier, “Le president nouveau est arrive.”