It's that time of the year again, when vinotecas take advantage of this marketing phenomenon known as the Beaujolais Nouveau. The release of this wine, which provides an opportunity to sample the first fruits of the year's harvest of grapes in autumn and the start of their manufacture into vintage wine, has been commercialised into a grand event in the last decade or so.
I remember how, in Japan, the arrival of the year's Beaujolais Nouveau, would be greeted with so much fanfare and marketing glitz. When I was still a student at Kandaiji dorm, the kombini (or produkty in Russian terms) -wait, I guess it was more a Mom-and-Pop's type of business- stocked up on the flowery-labeled Georges Duboeuf wines for sale late in the year. A good number of utterly bourgeois Japanese fell hook, line and sinker for this commercial tactic and bought this new wine by the crates. I kid you not. The frenzy was such -and this, I also remember more keenly from the Seijo Ishii, Tokyu and Coop supermarkets I frequented near my Ichigao station- the release of the wine was celebrated in the same fashion as one would anticipate St Valentine's Day or Halloween. This account is illustrative:
I never really understood the phenomenon. Well, it turns out that people have caught on and are no longer buying crates and cases of the wine as they used to.
William Campbell of Japan Times says that sales had gone down following a disastrous sales campaign in 2004. "By 2002, the supply-demand imbalance in Beaujolais had become so bad that the EU was forced to buy back more than 10 million liters of unsold wine, which ended up being converted into everything from wine vinegar to industrial ethanol," he said in an article published on 11 November 2005. The United States dropped off as the principal market, to be replaced by Japan.
So now the Beaujolais PR machine has "been looking to the unexplored markets of Asia and Eastern Europe to sop up excess supply", Campbell says.
I remember how, in Japan, the arrival of the year's Beaujolais Nouveau, would be greeted with so much fanfare and marketing glitz. When I was still a student at Kandaiji dorm, the kombini (or produkty in Russian terms) -wait, I guess it was more a Mom-and-Pop's type of business- stocked up on the flowery-labeled Georges Duboeuf wines for sale late in the year. A good number of utterly bourgeois Japanese fell hook, line and sinker for this commercial tactic and bought this new wine by the crates. I kid you not. The frenzy was such -and this, I also remember more keenly from the Seijo Ishii, Tokyu and Coop supermarkets I frequented near my Ichigao station- the release of the wine was celebrated in the same fashion as one would anticipate St Valentine's Day or Halloween. This account is illustrative:Unbeknownst to many, Beaujolais actually has a long history of producing top-flight wines. Although it is politically classified as part of Burgundy, geologically the Beaujolais region is really part of the Northern Rhone, as both share the same unique granite soils. The Gamay grape -- despite its lack of success elsewhere -- has thrived in Beaujolais for centuries, and during this time various sub-regions have been discovered that consistently produce the best grapes.For a good while, the going was really good for the producers. In fact, there was even a much anticipated Beaujolais Nouveau Day, the first day that the eponymous wine goes officially on sale. Annually, this is the third Thursday in November - a week before Thanksgiving Day for Americans. Its release, in belaboured mimicry of New Year's Day, is announced, banners fluttering, with much fanfare: "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!" (The New Beaujolais has arrived!). Pushing the envelope, a pop song "Beaujolais Day" was even written by Scottish pop rock artist Fish for his would-be fifth album with Marillion to make sure everyone in France, from Burgundy to Paris, got the message. Into Wine calls it one of the "most frivolous and animated rituals in the wine world".
Of the approximately 22,000 hectares under vine, roughly half are classified as simple "Beaujolais," and a quarter as the somewhat better "Beaujolais-Village." The remaining 25 percent of the vineyards are divided into 10 smaller appellations, or "Crus," which have proven to be the region's exceptional growing sites (the two most well-known are Morgon and Moulin-a-Vent, both of which make age-worthy wines that are certainly worth seeking out).
The double-edged sword for Beaujolais, however, has been the Nouveau "phenomenon."
In the Middle Ages, wine rarely made it through the spring without turning to vinegar, so by the time fall arrived, there was quite a bit of thirst built up for the next vintage. Noticing that the Gamay grape produced a wine that could be drunk only a few weeks after harvest, enterprising bistro owners in nearby Lyon used to ship barrels of young Beaujolais, some still fermenting, via a train of oxcarts each fall.
Having aged only a few weeks, the young wine certainly wasn't complex and was often still "gassy" (from the dissolved carbon dioxide from fermentation that hadn't yet had time to come out of solution), but it was refreshing, alcoholic and a welcome harbinger of fall.
Paris merchants tried similar promotions with young local wines, but only the soft Gamay grape from Beaujolais could be drunk in such a short cradle-to-goblet cycle (just try to imagine a Bordeaux Nouveau . . .), so the trains of oxcarts soon stretched all the way from Beaujolais to the capital.
As distribution by barrel became less common in the postwar years, the wine no longer had the luxury of finishing fermentation while still on the back of the truck. To avoid exploding bottles, it had to be degassed, filtered and chemically stabilized -- all within a few weeks of harvest. Yet despite this brutal treatment, people still enjoyed this new wine from Beaujolais, aka "Beaujolais Nouveau."
With the diffusion of French expatriates around the world, and the return of misty-eyed tourists with fond memories of quaffing just-harvested wine, the tradition of drinking Beaujolais Nouveau began to spread outside of France.
I never really understood the phenomenon. Well, it turns out that people have caught on and are no longer buying crates and cases of the wine as they used to.
William Campbell of Japan Times says that sales had gone down following a disastrous sales campaign in 2004. "By 2002, the supply-demand imbalance in Beaujolais had become so bad that the EU was forced to buy back more than 10 million liters of unsold wine, which ended up being converted into everything from wine vinegar to industrial ethanol," he said in an article published on 11 November 2005. The United States dropped off as the principal market, to be replaced by Japan.
So now the Beaujolais PR machine has "been looking to the unexplored markets of Asia and Eastern Europe to sop up excess supply", Campbell says.
Japan has been a dream come true, with Beaujolais imports reaching a whopping 717,000 cases in 2003, up from a mere 66,000 cases in the mid-'90s. 2003 was widely, and wildly, touted as the "vintage of the century" in France, and the buzz helped the '03 Beaujolais Nouveau to sell out in Japan in just a few days.It would be interesting to know how much longer would Japanese sustain this artificial product and the phenomenon behind it.
Following a trees-grow-to-the-sky "planning" philosophy, Japanese importers brought in an astounding 1 million cases of '04 Beaujolais Nouveau, almost all by ruinously expensive airfreight. While Nouveau is best consumed within a few weeks of release, and generally never after Jan. 1, WANDS magazine reported that Beaujolais Nouveau was spotted lingering on retailers' shelves well into the spring, and in some supermarkets even into August -- so much for a refreshing, just-picked taste.
Georges "The King of Beaujolais" Duboeuf personally attended the Tokyo Nouveau release parties for the past two years, perhaps not unsurprising given that Japanese now consume (or more accurately, that Japanese importers now buy) more than 50 percent of all the Beaujolais Nouveau exported from France.
Given last year's tepid demand, and a damaging investigation by French authorities into a Duboeuf blending scandal, no one knows how this year's campaign will play out. What is clear, however, is that even though Beaujolais may be a series of small villages in France's deep south, come the third Thursday in November, all eyes in that part of France at least will be focused on Tokyo.
