Beaujolais Nouveau 2023

The release of the new wine from Beaujolais each November used to be a much bigger deal than it is now!  For a number of years, beginning in 1951, the current vintage would be held at the winery until the third Thursday in November, and then shipped to Paris and other cities in Europe. It became trendy to send some by air freight to the US so that Americans could have it quickly, but demand was often higher than this method could handle.

In the 1980s, Beaujolais Nouveau really became popular in the US.
Recently, the wine of this region has been less popular, but it’s coming back.

By 2010, the rules changed. Since that time the newly-bottled wine has been shipped by sea to the US early in the month, but held by the wholesalers until the legal release date, this year Thursday, November 16. There’s still a lot of excitement about Beaujolais Nouveau, and the various shippers (especially our favorite Georges Duboeuf) create beautiful labels special to each year. We always enjoy drinking this iconic wine, which has such a short lifetime.

According to the Wine Spectator:

The 2023 harvest began, as is usual, on Sept. 1, following a difficult August that brought a heat wave, then hail damage in spots, then more heat that damaged younger vines and those planted at lower elevations. The temperatures put harvest on a rapid timeline, giving growers a sense of urgency to get the Gamay grapes off the vines to avoid excessive ripening. The resulting wines do have a bit more heft than the average Nouveau. ...

Wine lovers thirsty for fresh Nouveau to pour during their Thanksgiving feasts have it right: These wines are food-friendly and best enjoyed within a few months, so buy and drink now. 

At our local wine store — the 2023 vintage.

Beaujolais Publicity: Idyllic image of the vineyards in summer.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Elizabeth’s blog party.

 

Tradition! Beaujolais Nouveau 2022

 

Beaujolais Nouveau for Thanksgiving?

An ad for this year's Beaujolais Nouveau.
The Wine Spectator offers a review of this year's wine. 

What are you planning to drink with your Thanksgiving dinner in this unusual and very restricted year? When the fad for Beaujolais Nouveau was a big deal a number of years ago, we used to have it with our turkey every year. The producers in France release the first bottling of the new Beaujolais vintage on the third Thursday in November: coincidentally just in time for Thanksgiving. In the past, you had to reserve your wine, as only a few bottles arrived by air freight in the US quickly, and the rest came on a ship quite slowly. The familiar French announcement was "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!"

Sadly, the 2020 celebrations of the new wine in the Beaujolais region were cancelled due to the pandemic, and there are worries about how it will be shipped and sold. The harvest is good, but the distribution is precarious! 

Image from a EuroNews video about the 2020 Beaujolais Nouveau,
which was released November 19, 2020. (source)

Advertising campaigns in the 1990s vastly increased the demand for this young wine, and the vineyards and wine-shippers of Beaujolais began to bottle much more of new wine. They revised the arrangements to get it to market, so they could ship it before the release date, which is less fun, and the price crept up, so in recent years we have chosen other wines for Thanksgiving. Also this year, increased tariffs on French wine have made a formerly inexpensive treat into a higher-priced choice, and the pandemic, as I mentioned, is interfering with distribution. Some producers aren't even sending any to the US.  

I'm sure we will have some wine with whatever we eat on Thursday! Maybe even Beaujolais Nouveau 2020 (though I haven't yet located any available locally). I'm sharing my Thanksgiving beverage thoughts with other bloggers who get together at the Altered Book Lover blog.

Harvesting the grapes, 2020. It was a very abundant and promising harvest.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander, images as credited.

“Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!”

The 2017 Beaujolais Nouveau was released for sale just after midnight last night.

For dinner tonight, we enjoyed drinking our bottle of the new vintage from Beaujolais, which we bought this morning at Whole Foods.  "Each year since 1951," I read in the Wine Spectator, "the third Thursday of November marks the release of France’s Beaujolais Nouveau, a light-bodied red made from the just-completed harvest in the Beaujolais region, just south of Burgundy. It is both a celebration and a first taste for consumers of the newest vintage." And it's an important driver of the success of the Beaujolais regional wines: around 1/3 of their production is sold as Beaujolais Nouveau (according to this article).

"In the past," I read in The Wine Enthusiast, "the wine couldn’t leave Beaujolais until release time, and lorries and cars would race dangerously across Europe to deliver the wine to thirsty consumers in time for breakfast. Now, the wine is distributed ahead of time—you just can’t buy it until the magic hour." In fact, the first Beaujolais Nouveau used to be air-shipped to the US, so only a few bottles would be available shortly after the magic moment. For a while, it was a huge deal -- though the enthusiasm isn't as great now, as the supply is ensured by allowing delivery before the release date, rather than holding it at the wineries. It's always been a nice wine to have for Thanksgiving: the fresh new taste is actually quite nice with turkey. At right: a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau that we enjoyed in 2009.

This year, the vintners of the region have a lot to celebrate, as late frost, hail in July, and drought conditions resulted in difficult growing conditions and a low-yield harvest. The wine, however, seems to have turned out quite nice.

In the more distant past, many wine-making regions celebrated the first taste of new wine each year, but it was more informal and much more local. Somehow, the first tasting of the year's wines from Beaujolais became more of a ritual, and the newly bottled wine would show up in restaurants and wine bars in Paris, and when it became such a thing in France, the custom migrated to the US. In November of the year we spent in France, we were impressed when signs appeared in all the wine shops in our neighborhood reading: “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!”

To go with our wine we had some simple spaghetti with a few mushrooms,
garlic, shallots, tomato sauce, cheese, and a splash of the wine.

It used to be a big deal

We really kind of took the release of the new wine from Beaujolais as an event years ago. It was fun. The year we were actually in Paris, the wine stores had nice promotional posters taped up in the windows. “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!” they read. In the US, some wine came by air and you could get it right away and the rest came slowly by ship weeks later. (They've fixed that, I think, by putting it all on ships but making the sellers hold it back until the magic release date.)

Now it's just another wine. OK, it goes with turkey, so it's nice that it gets to the US just before Thanksgiving. But the other Beaujolais wines also go with turkey. They are more complex and interesting to drink -- and they aren't any more expensive, either. Wine snobs and wine ignoramuses have banded together to make it a non-event. The latter in fact seem to think that a "nouveau" is a variety of wine, not just a very young one. Even Wikipedia has a big article where you can learn the legend.

So here I am, a curmugeonly blogger on an obscure hobby horse about how things were better in the past. I'll get over it. And I did buy a couple of bottles to have over the weekend. We'll do something better to go with the turkey -- and blog that too.

AND an update on how some people maintain the big-dealness of it:

If there’s an art to balancing a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a fat glass of wine, a cell phone and shaking your bootie all at the same time, the guests at last night’s Francophone Fest had it down pat. Fueled on the just-uncorked harvest of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau and driving, multi-ethnic beats from all over the French-speaking world, party goers worked up a glow (chic speak for “sweating like a cochon”) on the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Ballroom floor as they danced the night away en français. [see Francophone Fest: Shakin’ it at the Roosevelt]