Beaujolais Nouveau and the Race to the Third Thursday
A wooden crate sits on a cafe counter in Lyon with the lid still nailed down. Behind it, a chalkboard has been wiped and rewritten in big letters: Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé. Nobody may open the crate until one minute past midnight. The wine inside was hanging on the vine in early September.
Most good wine asks you to wait years. Why does this one have a deadline measured in weeks?
A wine made to be drunk young
Beaujolais sits just south of Burgundy, in hills of granite and clay north of Lyon. Its grape is gamay, thin-skinned and bright. For centuries the first wine of each harvest went down the road in barrels to the bars of Lyon, drunk within weeks by people who did not care that it was young. Young was the point.
The trick that makes it ready so fast is called carbonic maceration. Whole bunches of grapes, uncrushed and still on their stems, go into a sealed tank filled with carbon dioxide. Starved of air, the grapes begin to ferment inside their own skins. After a few days they are pressed, and the fermentation finishes in the usual way. What comes out is soft, purple and full of fruit, with little of the tannin that makes a young red taste hard.
The smell gives it away: banana, bubblegum, cherry. Those notes come from the method, not from the grape.
The rule behind the date
After the Second World War, French rules said wines from the new harvest could not be sold until 15 December. The Beaujolais growers pushed back, and in 1951 they won an earlier release for their young wine: 15 November.
A fixed date had a problem. Some years 15 November fell on a Sunday, when shops were shut, and the party lost its momentum. In 1985 the date moved to the third Thursday of November, so the wine would arrive just before a weekend. This year that Thursday is 19 November.
Selling a deadline
A wine with a release day is a wine with a story, and the merchants of the region knew it. The best known was Georges Duboeuf, a wine merchant who spent decades turning the release into an event. Posters, parties, the slogan on the chalkboard.
In the 1970s the arrival became a race. Drivers, pilots and wine merchants competed to carry the first bottles from Beaujolais to London, and newspapers covered it like a sporting event. Later the race went global. Japan, a few hours ahead of France, drinks its first glasses before Paris does, and for years it has been one of the wine’s largest markets outside France.
How to drink it
The rules are short.
- Serve it cool: a little colder than room temperature, around 12 to 14 C. Twenty minutes in the fridge is about right.
- Drink it soon: Nouveau is at its best in the months after release, and most of it should be gone by spring.
- Eat with it: it suits the food of Lyon, cured sausage, a rough terrine, roast chicken, a plate of cheese. In America it often appears on the Thanksgiving table a week later, where it cuts the richness of the meal.
If you like it, try the next step up. The ten Beaujolais crus, villages such as Morgon, Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent, make gamay that is aged properly and can keep for years. Same grape, same hills, a much slower clock.
The crate at midnight
Back in Lyon, the clock on the cafe wall passes twelve. The lid comes off the crate, the first bottle goes round the bar, and the glasses come back purple. Two months ago this was fruit on a hillside. Tonight it is the first taste of a year that has not finished yet.