The last seven weeks of the year--the Holiday Season--are the most important weeks of the retail year. Thanksgiving is a big week in the wine and food business, and the entire month of December is a frenzy of activity from gift basket assembly to Christmas wines all the way to New Year's Eve Champagnes.
In our wine shop, the holiday season kicks off with the worldwide release of Nouveau Beaujolais on the third Thursday of November, conveniently one week before the great wine holiday Thanksgiving.
I first heard of Nouveau Beaujolais about thirty years ago. It was the first wine release of the vintage and it was celebrated in Paris and all over France. Master promoter Georges Duboeuf thought it would be a good idea to bring Beaujolais, Paris and France to the rest of the world by pre-shipping each year's new wine to warehouses abroad so it could be released at the same day everywhere. In 1985, the third Thursday of November was selected as the uniform release date for Nouveau Beaujolais by the French wine authorities, the INAO.
Ever since, Nouveau Beaujolais parties have sprung up, Nouveau Beaujolais nights at French restaurants with Edith Piaf singing in the background, and of course, all major wine stores offering a selection of the Nouveaus for their patrons. It's a great way to have Paris come to you.
Each year, The Wine Country joins in the fun by selecting six or seven Nouveau Beaujolais from reliable producers, and they usually sell out within about a week. Yet each year we seem to have to explain ourselves to wine snobs who place Nouveau Beaujolais somewhere in the wine heirarchy between White Zinfandel and Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
Wine snobs are missing the point, as they almost always do. Nouveau Beaujolais is not supposed to be a Grand Vin, just like In-N-Out is not supposed to be Haute-Cuisine. Nouveau's appeal is its honest frivolity, a fruity, frothy, lively wine that modern custom has embraced as a souvenir of the recent harvest and as a simple beverage of good cheer.
Some wine people blame the relatively simple Nouveau Beaujolais--often the only wine from the Beaujolais region some people have heard of--for besmirching the reputation of serious Beaujolais producers. It certainly is true a mass-production, thin and characterless Beaujolais from a company like Jadot or B & G has turned off a lot of people to this fine food wine. But only the most superficial wine dabbler would dismiss an entire wine region after drinking a Costco wine before exploring the depths of that region's offerings before making final judgments.
Beaujolais is located south of Burgundy, near the French gastronomic capital of Lyon. The gravelly soils make a good host for Gamay Noir, the grape of the region. The finest and deepest wines are usually from the hillside Crus, named after the 10 villages/regions that lie next to them: Brouilly, Cotes de Brouilly, Julienas, Saint Amour, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Chenas, Regnie, Moulin-a-Vent and Morgon.
To many American wine lovers, the "finest" and "deepest" kinds of wine are all that is desired, but there are many Beaujolais that are delicious when made in a less concentrated style. Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages are appellations that can offer wonderful wines when the producer knows what he is doing. A shimmering glass of Beaujolais accompanying a roast chicken, a prime rib or the upcoming Thanksgiving meal is a revelation when all you've experienced are "fine" and "deep" wines of, say, Darioush.
When you visit Beaujolais, you may catch a vigneron slicing off a piece of salami and a piece of cheese to munch on with his casual wine. It's profound in its simplicity.
We eat ham for Easter, corn on the cob in summer, pumpkin pie and roast turkey for Thanksgiving and we drink eggnog at Christmas. These are seasonal pleasures tied to American culture like baseball in the summer and football in the fall. Nouveau Beaujolais comes to the wine lover in such a seasonal and celebratory spirit.
Not all meals are created equal, so it is with wine. But you deprive yourself of a lot of joyousness if you don't go with the flow of the seasons and stick to a strict regimen of branded wine. To me, it's like eating the same meal every day of your life. I like haute cuisine and I like In-N-Out cheeseburgers. I like drinking rose in the summer and I like drinking Nouveau Beaujolais in the fall.
And I'll be there with the rest of you Thursday November 17 sampling the Duboeuf, the Ferraud, the Drouhin, the Dupeuble, the Jean Foillard and the Bouchard at The Wine Country's annual Beaujolais Fest. French music will be on the stereo and we'll share our appreciation of the season with wine lovers the world over.
Then winter comes and I'll drink something else.
1 comments:
very cool!
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