Happy Beaujolais Nouveau Day

Beaujolais Nouveau Day is marked in France on the third Thursday in November marked with festivals, music, parties. It all started over a hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the end of the harvest with light and fruity ready to drink wines. In the early 1960’s some winemakers, such as Georges Duboeuf, thought it would be fun to make it a contest as to who could get the wines to Paris the fastest. This attracted much media attention throughout the country, by the 1970’s it was a national event.

Beaujolais Nouveau is an inexpensive wine meant to be drunk young - it is a fun and easy drinking wine.

It’s made using the process of ‘carbonic maceration’ whereby whole bunches of grapes are fermented in sealed tanks topped with carbon dioxide. In this scenario, the fermentation starts inside individual grapes. The whole clusters are then pressed and fermentation finishes. This technique preserves the fresh, fruity quality of the grapes without extracting bitter tannins from the grape skins. The wine is bottles very quickly, about 6 – 8 weeks after harvest.

Buying a Beaujolais: The classification ranges from Beaujolais Nouveau, Beaujolais AOP (there are 96 winemaking villages), Beaujolais Villages AOP (there are 38), Beaujolais Supérieur and Beaujolais Crus (there are 10 Crus).

Beaujolais Nouveau:

Flavors: Fruity aromas and flavors of light raspberry, cranberry, candied like fruit, banana and fig.

Acidity: High

Tannins: Low

Serve: Slightly chilled

Pair with your next Thanksgiving Turkey - the higher acidity, low tannins and fruit forwardness make it an all around great meal wine.