It’s no secret that the French are deeply proud of their wine but Beaujolais Nouveau is treated to fanfare-like no other. Its designated holiday, marked every year on the third Thursday in November when its production ends and selling begins, is kind of like a French version of Thanksgiving.
There’s often a mad rush in supermarkets to ensure a healthy supply at home and friends meet in bars to raise a glass and toast a new season. In the wine-growing town of Beaujeu, the first barrels, strapped with flaming vine shoots, are rolled through the streets before being drilled into and quickly consumed.
Under French law, the wine is released at 12:01 a.m., just weeks after the wine’s grapes have been harvested. Parties are held throughout the country and further afield to celebrate the first win of the season. During the afternoon on Beaujolais Nouveau Day, a heated tent offers wine and a range of local foods for visitors to sample.
There is also a tasting contest featuring all of the twelve kinds of Beaujolais, in which the winner gets his or her
weight in Beaujolais-Villages. In the evening, a torch-lit parade honors the farmers that made the wine. Fireworks at midnight mark the release of the new wine, which is then drunk until dawn.
Beaujolais Nouveau is meant to be drunk young. Most vintages should be consumed by the following May after its release. However, in excellent vintages (such as 2000) the wine can live much longer and can be enjoyed until the next harvest rolls around. Today, there are several dozen vintners making this popular red.
The Beaujolais region is 34 miles long from north to south and 7 to 9 miles wide and home to nearly 4,000 vineyards which produce twelve officially-designated types of Beaujolais known as
AOCs.
They include some of the finest and priciest grand crus (big vintage) wines around, including Fleurie and Cote de Brouilly. The most common two are the Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages, the former of which account for half of the region’s annual output.
In 2010, 35 million bottles of wine were put on the market. Some 7.5 million were sold in French supermarkets and 15.5 million were exported mainly to Japan, Germany, and the United States. Beaujolais Nouvea
u owes its easy drinkability to a winemaking process called carbonic maceration, also known as whole-berry fermentation. This technique preserves the fresh, fruity quality of the grapes without extracting bitter tannins from the grape skins.
The wine itself is also something of a marketing gimmick. Beaujolais Nouveau is only aged and fermented for two months after harvest, making it a very young wine.
Winemakers essentially regard it as a preview of what that vintage’s Beaujolais cru will taste like once it finishes aging. Beaujolais wine is made of 100% Gamay grapes in the Beaujolais region of Southern Bur
gundy.
After picking, it undergoes a process called “carbonic maceration” where the grape juice is allowed to ferment while still inside the grape berries before pressing. This process results in a wine surprisingly low in tannins for a red due to the naturally thin skins of the Gamay grapes.
It’s an interesting process, but is the resulting wine celebration-worthy? Wine people are quite divided on that front. Beaujolais Nouveau is a very young and unsubtle wine.
The notes of fresh and candied red berries in it can be a bit much for many palates. It’s not for nothing that almost every description of it includes the word “tutti-frutti”. It’s really only good until the May following its harvest unless it’s a particularly stand-out batch.
Some people think that the relative youth and short shelf-life of the wine make it problematic to ship overseas, leading to an inferior quality Beaujolais Nouveau experience for those not lucky enough to be in France during the release season.
It also chills well, and the
fruity character that turns so many people off also makes it a surprisingly good wine to pair normally challenging-to-pair foods with.
Thanksgiving, for instance, is often problematic in terms of pairings. It involves poultry, which normally pairs with a white but not everybody likes white. That’s where our light-bodied friend Beaujolais comes in to save the day.
