The Rights And Wrongs Of Beaujolais

If you read other publications with food and drink sections (and that’s OK with us), you’ll start seeing articles on Beaujolais wines in about a month. These discussions will mostly go on about how dandy these wines are with large, family-oriented dinners featuring turkey and not just some, but all the fixings. This is an advisory for those roaming readers: all wines from Beaujolais are not the same.

On the third Thursday of November, something called Beaujolais Nouveau is released. It’s the first finished wine made from that year’s grape harvest that takes place about two months earlier (right about now, in fact). Not coincidentally, the release of Beaujolais Nouveau comes seven days prior to the fourth Thursday in November, during a week filled with crowded food markets, turkey roasting angst and the annual trip to the wine shop in the U.S.

When most harried shoppers arrive at the wine store, they’ll vaguely recall something about buying Beaujolais from something they read and be confronted with colorful stacks of Beaujolais Nouveau cases. Many will toss five or six bottles in their basket and race to the mega-mart to wrestle for that last can of cranberry sauce.

This year, sometime after the blessing, but before the Arizona Cardinals take on the Philadelphia Eagles on Nov. 27, several dinner guests will quietly comment: “Yuck! This wine tastes like coffee-flavored bubble gum!”

These unfortunate experiences cast a long shadow over what can be an amazing wine. Regular Beaujolais (sans Nouveau) are made with gamay grapes and are indeed wonderfully food-friendly wines. These “other” Beaujolais wines, known as Beaujolais-Villages or Cru Beaujolais, come from the northern part of the Beaujolais region in France and are usually pleasant, fruity, earthy wines with perfume-like aromas. They will always be at least one or two years old and worth the wait.

Investors from Champagne and Burgundy are making great improvements in these regular Beaujolais properties. So Beaujolais-Villages and Cru Beaujolais wines stand to get even better in the coming years. The Nouveau properties in southern Beaujolais? Not so much. Exports of Beaujolais Nouveau have dropped precipitously in the past few years (down 21 percent in 2007). Consumers can take only so much candy-coated coffee grounds. Whole vineyards, in fact, have been ripped up in recent years on Beaujolais’ southside.

Remember: Buy Beaujolais, but beware the Nouveau.

2006 Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages, France

• $12

• Two Thumbs Up

• Bright, fruit-filled aromas with a touch of violets. It had enjoyable flavors of ripe raspberries and strawberries with notes of mushrooms and clove spice.