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Nouveau
niche
It’s barely wine, but it is loads of fun. As the Beaujolais Nouveau
trucks roll into Gastown, a few memories and a few warnings, the
first being: eat, to save your life!
by
JURGEN GOTHE
It was, at the time of its invention – and let’s be clear: it was
invented – one of the best wine-marketing ploys ever. And while it
may have lost some of its frenzied lustre over the past decade,
there still is cause for celebration – and imbibing – when
Beaujolais Nouveau hits town; any town, French especially, but our
town, too.
Beaujolais Nouveau is
the yearling wine, the first one out of the chute with the current
year’s vintage date on the label, at least in this hemisphere (I
just drank a bottle of 2008 the other night, but as you may have
guessed, that would have been Chilean).
I can recall three
major memories of Beaujolais Nouveaux, one includes falling off the
back of a truck one mid-November midnight, not far from the wine
town of Beaune in the heart of Beaujolais country. Another centres
around sipping the new French wine aboard a rockin’, rollin’
railcar, recently reclaimed from the eastern part of the newly
undivided Germany. It came in a can – the nouveau did – and was
room-temperature tepid but what the hell; we – the Paris-bound
passengers on the train we’d boarded in Berlin – got it first,
which is what used to count.
The third and best
happened in Paris inside and out of the fabled Fauchon food store.
“Sample some of the new wine, monsieur?” asked a friendly pourer
holding a magnum. We did and kept on sampling till we had tasted
all five of the ones on offer. Neither at the start of the tasting
nor the finish could we detect a difference among the five. Then we
went out into the street. It was just past one o’clock and people
were having their lunch.
Quelle frénésie! Folks
were tucking into their lunch sitting on the hoods of parked 2CVs
(no mean feat if you consider the structure of the little cars!),
delivery lorries, on the front steps of parked buses; tossing the
wine back by the bucketful and the afternoon was surely more of a
write-off than most in French business and commerce. I have the
photos to prove it. My own face is blocked.
The people at
Gastown’s French bistro, Jules, are very much involved this year –
be there for the first sip and plan to stay till the
not-all-that-bitter-but-potentially-hurtin’ end. Their menu is
totally attuned to it, with bistro faves, hearty fare and let’s
just hope they put out the big-bottomed glasses for this wine. I
don’t know about the party spilling out into the street, although
it’s a pleasant scenario to consider. Only one way to find out:
being there.
Nouveau is a gulping
wine. It wants a sturdy glass – a tumbler is just fine; easier to
set down – and it needs a good chill on it. Above all it wants
food. No, it absolutely requires food to go along. Because to the
unwary, it can kill.
They are the wines
that used to blow into town as close as possible to the 15th of
November, which used to be the fixed date for releasing it from the
holding pens in Burgundy. That restriction has been relaxed
considerably of late; now it gets here whenever, around the middle
of the month, fresh from the barrel. And in most cases, not even
anywhere near a barrel, but straight from the fermentation tanks,
still thrashing about with remnants of restless yeasts, clamoring
straight into the bloodstream.
For goodness’ sake eat
something, before, during and after.
“Fresh” definitely is
the operative word with these wines. You drink ’em now and you
drink ’em up. If there is any left by Christmas somebody wasn’t
pulling their weight. The French have a saying (the French always
have a saying!): “Beaujolais brings laughter to the table,” which,
by extension, means that Beaujolais Nouveau brings gales of guffaws
and knee-slapping punch lines nobody can remember three minutes
later.
Mind you, as a wine,
BJ barely qualifies for the term by the skin of its grapes, and
those would be Gamay, full name Gamay Noir à jus blanc. It didn’t
come into being for any lofty or lyrical reasons. Sheer necessity
made it happen. The ordinary table reds were practically gone from
the producers’ cellars by mid-October. The really good wines from
the previous harvest were resting still. They wouldn’t be released
till spring at the earliest. So what was there to drink in the
house? Not much. Maybe if we drew off a little of this new stuff,
even if it’s still bubbling a bit, we’d have something to keep the
croque monsieur company until we can get down into the cellar after
New Year’s and see how the serious stuff is shaping up. Presto!
Nouveau!
It is food wine, first
and foremost. Drinking it all on its own, with the accompanying
swirling, sniffing, spitting, will only cloud the issue – to say
nothing of your head. BJ not only welcomes food, it insists on it.
So whether you are hosting a multi-course Beaujolais dinner or sit,
elbows up on the arborite counter with friends, there’s got to be
some food, even if it’s just a cheese bun, some salami and a
pickle.
There used to be this
big race thing: releasing it at midnight on the 15th, shipping it
as quickly as possible, making a competition out of getting it to
the city – Paris, initially, and in time, any city anywhere – so
you could claim to have it first. Jules will have it, if not first
then certainly very soon after. The house paté is perfect with it,
the little baguette they serve with it, too – they’re going to have
to call the bakery and lay in a supply; I’ve been known to put away
the better part of a whole one, before dinner, and then go straight
on to the frites.
This is the accepted ritual for Beaujolais Nouveau: if the server
offers you the obligatory thimbleful to sniff, just wave your hand
at the glass and say, “Fill ’er up, pal,” in French if you can
manage it. Then the stuff goes down the hatch and straight to your
head, where it sits, a couple of flights up from the medulla
oblongata, humming like a haywire Coke cooler in a gas stop near
the New Mexico border.
Who knows what the
brands will be? Those are decided by the Liquor Board people
according to who bids to supply a batch. Usually we see Georges
Duboeuf and often Mommesin, too; one or two other big-name
Burgundians.
So let’s have a toast
to 1947, when the first Beaujolais Nouveau was launched by one
Roland Bouchacourt, who dropped it off on the doorsteps of the
bistros in Montmartre. These days it gets dropped off at various
restaurants about town, including on the doorstep at 216 Abbott
Street.
You want tasting
notes? It’s fresh, I think I’ve said that; light but super fruity,
a little yeasty. It will taste like every other Beaujolais Nouveau,
past or future. Only it will cost ten times what it did in 1947.
Nice to know some things don’t change when – as I heard some
economist say just the other day – things are “seasonally adjusted
to take into account inflation – and the currency
snake.”
As for cellaring –
this is a column called “Best Cellars” after all – you do and
you’ll be regretting it. Anybody in a restaurant offers you a
bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau “from an exceptional vintage” has seen
you coming.
Get out while you still can.
Jules’
evening of food and Beaujolais Nouveau is Nov. 20, at 216 Abbott
St. Details: 604-669-0033, julesbistro.ca. Open Monday–Saturday,
lunch: 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m., afternoons: 2:30–5:30 p.m., dinner:
5:30–10 p.m.
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