The Third Thursday

Most Beaujolais is made by carbonic or semi-carbonic maceration, and the technique explains most of what people think they know about the wine.

Whole bunches go into a sealed tank filled with carbon dioxide. With no oxygen available, each intact berry begins fermenting inside its own skin, an enzymatic process quite different from ordinary yeast fermentation in a vat of crushed fruit. Later the berries break under their own weight and a conventional fermentation finishes the job.

What comes out has colour and a very particular aromatic profile, the banana and cherry and boiled-sweet character people either love or object to, and crucially very little tannin.

Tannin is what a young red wine needs years to resolve. Extract almost none of it and you have a wine that is genuinely pleasant eight weeks after the harvest, which is not something you can say about very much else.

That technical fact made Beaujolais Nouveau possible, and Nouveau made the region rich and then nearly finished it.

Start with why it was a good idea, because it usually gets told as a blunder and it was not.

A grower makes wine once a year. Costs run continuously and revenue arrives when the wine is sold, which for a serious red is eighteen months to two years after the fruit came in. For a grower with capital that is a financing problem. For a grower without capital it is an existential one, and Beaujolais was full of the second kind.

Nouveau collapses that gap to about eight weeks. Pick in September, sell in November, get paid before Christmas. That is not a marketing gimmick, it is a solution to the central cash flow problem of farming, and it worked.

It worked so well that it became the region.

Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé, on posters in every window, in countries that had never previously drunk French wine at all. Enormous volumes moved every November. For an entire generation of drinkers, Nouveau was not one Beaujolais among several. It was the only Beaujolais they had ever met.

And so the region acquired an identity it had not chosen: cheap, young, simple, fun, not serious. The crus, which are none of those things, spent the next thirty years being sold against the reputation of their own name, which is why they lean so hard on the commune and so lightly on the region.

There is a general lesson here and it is not confined to wine.

Nobody at any point decided that Beaujolais should be a party drink. What happened is that a region sold a great deal of one kind of wine, for perfectly sound reasons, and the market drew the obvious conclusion about what the region was for.

The gap between the thing you sell most of and the thing you want to be known for is not a gap your customer is obliged to notice, or even to believe in once you start insisting on it. Volume defines you whether or not you intended it to, and the correction takes a generation longer than the original success did.