Rethinking Beaujolais
It's way more than nouveau, we just don't know it yet...

By Jonathon Alsop
November 16, 2006

Beaujolais hits the trifecta for old world wine: it's the name of a grape, a wine, and a geographical region in France, all at the same time. Beaujolais the grape goes by other names confusingly -- gamay, for instance; the region is further broken down into regions and neighborhoods like Morgon, Fleurie, Saint Amour and at least a dozen others that would be hard to keep in your head unles you lived there.

Beaujolais the wine is famous for essentially two things in the US: a version of itself called "nouveau" -- French for new -- a wine that's made and released the same year within weeks of harvest, and low prices. Really low prices. Order now and save low prices. Very top of the Beaujolais food chain is about $25, the middle or bottom tier of wines in many other more famous French regions. In a typical wine shop, you'd have to look hard to find one for $20. Most are between $8 and $12.

This nouveau phenomenon is not limited to the Beaujolais region, nor is it limited to France. Nouveau has been made for probably thousands of years in many different forms all over the wine making world. Wine makers have always siphoned off a little bit of the early juice and made a quick easy wine to celebrate the harvest, or they've always wanted to. The Rhone valley in southern France makes very tasty nouveau in almost complete obscurity, and many wineries in northeast Italy make self-styled "novello" from an otherwise unknown grape called teraldego.

When I say there's more to Beaujolais than nouveau, I want to make sure that comes out just right. I'm not anti-nouveau: I buy plenty of it every year. It's fun and frivolous, and in spite of itself, nouveau is interesting and a little meaningful, being the first wine from the new French vintage many of us will taste. But nouveau is in the $12 range, at least when it first arrives by air on the third Thursday of every November, and for only $5 more all year long, you can be drinking some of the best wines the Beaujolais region makes. This time of year, there's a huge rush on nouveau, and the rest of the time, people see Beaujolais on the shelf and think to themselves, "You're supposed to drink that stuff by New Year's, right?"

Landscape Of Wine

Imagine that the Beaujolais region is shaped like a wine bottle with the top pointing north and the bottom sitting right on the city of Lyon. The big southern end of the bottle is generic Beaujolais where most of the cheapest wine comes from. As you move north towards the top of the bottle, the region tapers, until you have ten tiny wine towns all in a row filling up the neck of the bottle. They call these towns "Crus Beaujolais," and although "cru" doesn't literally mean crew, it's pronounced the same and means just about that. They hang together in the top tier, committed to high-quality region-specific Beaujolais.

These ten towns -- Brouilly, Cote de Brouilly, Regnie, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin a Vent, Chenas, Saint Amour, and Julienas -- account for many of the best wines the region has to offer. Their soils and geographies are drastically different place to place, and since each town grows the same grape -- Beaujolais -- and makes wine in essentially the same way, it's fascinating to experience the flavor of the different landscapes right in the wine glass. After a couple of milennia, the ground is really the only variable.

Georges Duboeuf was not the inventor of nouveau, not by quite a few centuries, but he was the first person who realized there was something unique and saleable about it. Le Hameau: the hamlet, the home town, perfect for Beaujolais... for a lot of American wine lovers, the first French we tasted was some Beaujolais, still tasty but with an edge that tells you it's a glass of wine that takes itself serious glass of wine. Moving on from the delightful Beaujolais to other more challenging less likeable wines is like breaking up with the hometown girlfriend. It's not enough just to break up with her, you have to break and move on decisively, never looking back.



Long history, ancient Roman influences. The town of Romaneche got its name from the Latin "Roma ecco" which means, literally, "The Romans are here" and figuratively, "There's a new sheriff in town."



Bordering On Burgundy

One of the tricks of finding great wine bargains in Europe is to identify a famous (expensive, that is) wine region you love, and then buy the less expensive wines from the smaller unknown towns around it. The trick here is knowing geography, or course, and cross-referencing that geographic knowledge with what's in the wine aisle.

Louis Jadot is a giant French wine producer with its headquarters in Burgundy,







Mommessin, a very big producer on its own, is part of an even larger international entity, Boisset. At their best when they cross the line between Beaujolais and southern Burgundy. Pouilly-Fuisse -- hard to say but worth learning how to -- was one of the best wines I'd had all week.









Julienas Calendar

Artists have understood for a long time that the best art doesn't come from the middle of the field, it comes from the edge, the fringe where creators invent, re-invent, and consequently live right on the edge of viability.