The Ides of November were last week, and if March can have Ides, which Julius Caesar was advised to avoid, why can’t November?
Many European countries look for excuses to have holidays, not just on Mondays, and France has made a sort of informal holiday out of mid-November, when the first red Beaujolais wine of the year’s vintage can come on the market. This is a good excuse to drink wine, to sell wine and to celebrate with the popping of corks.
The French look at the Nouveau Beaujolais as just another new wine, something very young, to be quaffed as an indication that yes, Virginia, there has been another grape crop, another harvest, another fermentation and proof in the bottle while the better stuff improves quietly by resting in barrels for a year or two.
There used to be a lot of hoopla and foofaraw over the Nouveau Beaujolais, with phony stories about airplanes racing across the Atlantic to get the first bottles to the U.S., where drinkers were looking for something to celebrate between Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.
In truth, the Nouveau cannot be great wine. It’s too young. It’s there to be drunk more for fun than for serious.
Eddie Neill knows this, and uses it as an excuse to decorate Café Provencal and sponsor a party, with some good Beaujolais dishes and samples of various Beaujolais wines. Sometimes, the young ones give an indication of how they will mature. The Beaujolais region, by the way, is south of Burgundy in eastern France, on the west side of the Saone River. It’s 34 miles long, about seven miles wide. Beaujolais wines are made from Gamay grapes and must be harvested by hand.
Neill’s offering last week, which will be on the list at his Kirkwood establishment – and other wine bars, too – into spring or early summer of 2008, came from the highly regarded Drouhin family, which makes good wine from its estate and winery near Beaune, in the heart of Burgundy, and also produces Pinot Noir in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington. Pinot Noir, by the way, is the grape from which Burgundy wines are made. Beaujolais, as noted, uses the lighter Gamay grape/
The ‘07 Nouveau was quite good, showing lots of grape flavor with hints of raspberries the aroma and on the palate. I think it’s extremely drinkable right now, and a good value in the under-$10 school of wines, but no one really knows how it will be by next year.
Drouhin, Jules Jadot and Georges duBoeuf make Nouveau Beaujolais, as do some smaller producers. There are many different appellations of Beaujolais, named after styles of the wine (Nouveau, Villages and plain Beaujolais) or sub-regions (Brouilly, Chenes, Chiroubles, Cote de Brouilly, Fleurie, Julienas, Morgon, Mouln a Vent, Regnie and Saint Amour), and there is a white Beaujolais, too. Older Beaujolais wines show more body and a better balance than the Nouveau version.
–Joe