It's Time for Something Nouveau

Duboeuf’s Beaujolais Nouveau is an annual tradition for many

This is the time of year wine lovers get ready to drop all pretense of vinous snobbishness and admit that a glass (okay, a bottle) of Beaujolais Nouveau is actually a pretty cool thing for a chilly November night. Beaujolais Nouveau is a wine many consumers bash as cheap, low alcohol, wine-soda, but come on, it’s fun and makes no effort to pose as a serious wine. It is, after all, from the 2019 harvest, so it’s barely six weeks old – there has been no time for the development of complex flavors and nuances. This is simple, fermented grape juice in its purest form.

I have often shunned Beaujolais Nouveau in the past but I’m rethinking that prejudice. Perhaps it has been me and not the wine that cast it as the pretender to the throne of the many great wines produced in Beaujolais. I am dismayed that many consumers thing Beaujolais Nouveau, released on the third Thursday of November each year, is all there is to Beaujolais. Yes, there is much more to this region and its noble expressions of the gamay grape, but Nouveau is, or at least we should allow it to be, proudly simple.

The timing of the wine’s release has played into a fair amount of marketing hype linking Beaujolais Nouveau with the American Thanksgiving holiday that occurs exactly one week after the nouveau is released. That timeliness, plus low tannin, moderately high acidity and plump, juicy flavors have made this wine popular on Thanksgiving tables and especially with newcomers to wine who don’t want to get bogged down with chewy tannins and discussions of forest floor aromas.

This year, Beaujolais (and a lot of other wines) have another hurdle on their path to market success: tariffs. The US government, responding to a World Court ruling that approved punitive action against Europe for illegal subsidies of passenger aircraft, has decided we wine lovers should be punished as well. This year, Beaujolais and many other still wines, will be subjected to a 25 per-cent tariff. On the surface, that might seem like a serious issue but a minor irritation for wines as inexpensive as Beaujolais, but if it raises the price two or three dollars at retail, that will cause many people to rethink the purchase. Many producers are hoping tariffs are a short-term inconvenience and are absorbing the price hikes themselves to preserve the market, but that isn’t a long-term solution.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Dominique Piron, the president of the association of Beaujolais producers, acknowledged that the issues are complicated. “Today, world commerce is complicated, especially in a period where the competition is strong,” he said very diplomatically. Take out the diplomacy and he’s very unhappy about tariffs. Will that affect what shows up on your Thanksgiving table? “That depends,” says Frank Duboeuf, now head of the most famous winery in Beaujolais where nouveau was pioneered by his father Georges. He is in Houston today for tomorrow’s kickoff of the Beaujolais Nouveau selling season, and he says the 2019 vintage is very good indeed. But is that enough? I can only echo Mr. Duboeuf and say, “That depends.”

Cheers!