Rad Wine You Can Totally Afford: Back to Beaujolais

Beaujolais Nouveau: The Technical Bits

Beaujolais is a red wine made of the gamay grape in the region of Beaujolais, just south of Burgundy proper, in France.

The “nouveau” version is the first-made, low-tannin, fruit-forward version of this wine. To maintain its light character and bright fruit flavor profile, it undergoes an expedited fermentation via carbonic maceration (that is, whole grape fermentation in-skin, prior to crushing and pressing), and is then pressed from its skins quickly, receiving just enough contact to color the resultant wine, but incurring minimal tannins.

(Tannin is that stuff in red wine that makes it feel like someone just sucked all the moisture out of your mouth, and it lives in the seeds and skins of grapes. If you have some red table grapes nearby, go peel a bit of the skin off and munch on it. Bitter and mouth-drying, right? That’s what balances all that cooked fruit flavor in cabernet. I digress.)

This quickly-created wine is the first released of any given vintage — legally not to be made available before the third Thursday of November, just weeks after the grapes are hand-picked. Thus, both the date and the wine itself are accompanied by much press and festivity both within and outside of France. Beaujolais is meant to be drunk immediately and doesn’t show improvement with age. Lucky bonus? It goes pretty goddamn well with the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, which just so happens to be exactly one week after this wine hits the shelves.

Beaujolais Nouveau: The Important Stuff

Although I’m pretty much an amateur, it’s my understanding that Beaujolais, nouveau or otherwise, isn’t exactly prized in the wine world. One of the somms I studied under, in describing the region’s location, explained, “It’s right there, sort of clinging desperately to Burgundy — who I’m sure would be glad to have rid of it.” 

According to my just-now Wikipedia research (#professional), prominent wine critic Karen MacNeil once wrote — meaning this as a perjorative, mind you — that “Drinking it gives you the same kind of silly pleasure as eating cookie dough.”

Well, I fucking like cookie dough, don’t you? I’ve said before that cookie dough is maybe the only reason to make cookies in the first place. 

Yeah, maybe Beaujolais nouveau is what you’d call a “bitch red.” It’s like rosé: best served slightly chilled, with no secondary or tertiary (age-related, oak-conferred) characteristics to speak of. It’s got no spice, no oxygen, no rich tannin — none of that deep, round, grip-you-by-the-gut persistence of cabernet or shiraz. 

But this wine is supposed to be young and fruity and fun. It’s made quickly and meant to be drunk rather than stored. It’s about bacchian energy and life-affirmation. It’s about celebrating a successful harvest. It’s about acknowledging another year’s close, and the promise of new opportunities on the horizon.

Plus, some of the typical flavor notes of this guy are cotton candy and kirsch — that’s the liquid maraschino cherries are floating in; don’t worry, it took me forever to figure that out, too. And because it’s not costly to produce, it’s cheap — an import for less than $10! The upshot? You need to go get yourself some Beaujolais — and open it. Tonight. 

Duboeuf did pretty well this year. The wine comes bottled under synthetic cork in a beautifully-decorated bottle, and it’s a got a rich, young ruby color. On the nose, it’s like a stawberry-banana smoothie — on the palate, some of that candy flavor comes out to play, and still more tropical notes, like fig. It’s all balanced with a crisp, refreshing acid that lands this bottle firmly on my summertime, poolside reds list — and since I live in Florida, poolside in December is a total possibility.

So if you grab a bottle, let me know what you think! Oh, and invite me over. To drink some of it.