Beaujolais Blue Balls

[Sara is sleeping, or else I never would have been able to sneak this blog’s title through…]

Maybe you remember the old Paul Masson wine TV commercials, featuring Orson Welles, with the tagline “We will sell no wine before its time.”

(I know, I know, there are no commercials on PBS, maybe there was a pledge drive that week, so sue me…)

Well, no wine better lives up to the “no wine before its time” (or, frankly, “no wine before it’s time,” grammar inside joke, note the apostrophe) mantra like Beaujolais Nouveau. Whereas most wines are made with aging in mind (if not in practice), the Beaujolais is meant to be imbibed right away. And by “right away,” the French mean at or after midnight on the third Thursday of November.

Ya gotta love Wikipedia—apparently, when Beaujolais got its AOC (kind of like a French government trademark to protect regional foods and drinks, so that only Idaho farmers can claim to be selling Idaho potatoes), they were only allowed to legally sell their wine after a certain date. The specific date has changed since, but the fixed start date concept for sales remains, even if it’s more of a marketing gimmick than anything. Other interesting fact: Beaujolais is the only wine, along with Champagne, that must have its grapes harvested exclusively by hand, if it is to be known by the “Beaujolais” name.

Well, among the many things Sara and I have learned this year is that Beaujolais Nouveau is a bigger deal in America (and, interestingly, in Japan) than it is in France. I guess it makes sense. This wine, technically, is junk. It’s all the words you hear used by people spoofing wine reviews—it’s immature, impertinent, impudent, and impetuous. Serious wine drinkers here generally turn up their noses at the mere thought of it.

It makes total sense now that I think about it--the Beaujolais growers have put together an American-style marketing campaign, generating a date-based “buzz,” in order to get skeptical Americans to drink the stuff. It doesn’t hurt that Beaujolais Nouveau is generally to American tastes (light, fruity), and that it is released one week before Thanksgiving. So, as far as scams go, pawning off much of France’s Beaujolais isn’t quite like the Dutch buying Manhattan from the Native Americans for $24, it’s really more like a Hollywood studio making “Beverly Hills Cop XIV,” knowing it will crash and burn in American theaters, since “it will break even at the foreign box office.” Leave it to the foreign rubes, in other words!

So, what’s with the “Beaujolais Blue Balls” of the title? Well, Sara’s getting over a bit of stomach flu, so she wasn’t up for a midnight wine outing. But she signed off on my plan to do a “quick and dirty” Beaujolais trip, hitting the new wine bar that opened two doors down for a solo, single, speedy post-release glass of the new wine. The best-laid plans…

At 11:55PM, I left the building, jacket-free despite the near-freezing temps, to quickly scoot the 100 chilly feet to the wine bar. I bellied up to the bar, ordered a glass…and received a five-minute lecture from a fellow customer about how bad Beaujolais Nouveau is. Semi-drunkenly, she told me that this high-class wine bar knew better than to serve such swill, that it’s too young, too fresh, too fruity. She said that she didn’t care, some years it tastes like raspberries, some years it tastes like bananas, some years it tastes like “shaypahtrokwah” (slurred French equivalent of “ayedunnowhut”). As soon as I could, I backed out the door and headed home.

After a few minutes at home, I decided it was silly to be in the international wine capital of the world but still miss the world’s most hyped wine release. So this time with a jacket, I headed out the door to try out the café “at the bottom of the Mouffe,” the “local” at the bottom of the rue Mouffetard, our local market street. The owner, who knows us, shook my hand and greeted me as I came in, but told me that because of the traffic generated by today’s transit strike, their shipment wouldn’t arrive until the next day.

Heading back to our place, I passed a half Chinese restaurant, half French café hybrid establishment that Sara and I usually avoid. But earlier in the day I’d seen that they had “Beaujolais Nouveau” posters in their window, so despite the place’s utter lack of charm or even compelling French-ness, I tried stopping by. No dice—the doors were locked, and the owner yelled through them that, Beaujolais or not, I should come back tomorrow.

In America, after three strikes I’d be out, but since they don’t know from baseball here in France, I decided to keep trying. I headed by l’Ourcine, the delicious restaurant with the great reputation (DC folks—Tom Sietsema approves!) that’s at the end of the block. They know us by name, and they even went so far as to suggest to me earlier in the week some places where I could find good Beaujolais release parties, since they themselves would be serving the wine but not hosting any special festivities. But by the time I made it back to l’Ourcine, the lights were mostly off, only the staff was left, and they were getting their jackets on. It didn’t seem right to trouble them with my quest, so I just kept on moving by.

Stop number five was at Sara’s and my “Euro Fifty” bar. That’s not its name, that’s its appeal—they have a massively extended “all drinks for 1.50” happy hour, which at one point went from 4PM to midnight but now is 6-10PM or something like that. They also have tasty and inexpensive couscous as well. And, on this night, they not only had a “le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!” poster in the window, but the lights were still burning. Unfortunately for me, as I walked up, the owner was diplomatically escorting out his last, and quite inebriated, customer. It wasn’t quite closing time, but the drunk guy didn’t know that, so the owner was using that as a pretense to make him hit the road. After briefly pausing to shake my hand, the owner explained that yes, he had the wine, but due to present circumstances, I’d have to come back tomorrow to get it.

The drunk man, before heading home in the opposite direction but clearly based on hard-earned experience, reminded me that there was another bar a block away. So, I made my way towards bar number six. The bar was still bustling, a good sign. But when I asked the bartender for a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau, he told me that it wouldn’t be released until midnight on Thursday. I explained that it was in fact now past midnight on Thursday, that Wednesday had ended at 11:59PM and Thursday had begun at 12:00AM, or Thursday midnight. Not having any of my argument, he insisted that although he did have Beaujolais Nouveau “in the back,” his understanding was that midnight was the end and not the beginning of a day, and that he wouldn’t sell me a glass “in case I was with the government.” Unwilling to enter further into this astronomical and etymological debate about the nature of midnight, I withdrew, and headed home.

And that’s how I find myself sitting in my Paris living room, eating jelly beans and watching a French all-news channel, as the first hours of Beaujolais Nouveau time tick by. In a news story, they just described this year’s Beaujolais as “tendre et gourmand.” That means it’s tender and for gluttons/sweet tooths/bon vivants (Sara and I have been to a half-dozen French dinner parties where the word “gourmand” has been discussed and a successful English translation has been unsuccessfully sought.)

So, intrepid readers, it may well be the case that you, stateside, have tasted Beaujolais Nouveau before the Franco-Gibsons. All I can say is, “That's just like you immature, impertinent, impudent, and impetuous Americans!”

Josh