Tonight’s the night

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!

Or so cry the wine enthusiasts. There are all sorts of traditions around the release of each year’s new crop of Beaujolais. Bicycle and motorcycle races to get the first case of the stuff from the château to fashionable salons in Paris; chartered flights to take it to the U.S. and London. It’s supposed to be a precursor of how that year’s Burgundy will taste when it matures. That makes some sense; it’s from the same part of France. But if it were made the same way it would be Burgundy, not Beaujolais, and that would mean that it would be too young to drink until at least after the end of the second Bush Administration.

I used to go to the French-American Chamber of Commerce mixer for the Beaujolais premiere, hoping to network and make business contacts. For my trouble driving from Redondo Beach to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, during rush hour (a ninety-minute trek if I was lucky) I got to wander around a crowded hall with people who either wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t thin enough or were useless Hollywood fops looking for someone to read their screenplays. Well, what did I expect, going to a public party in Los Angeles? But on top of that, I discovered that Beaujolais, in addition to being the subject of a lot of silly wine-snob hype, turns out to be thin, weak-tasting semi-sweet grape juice with all the subtlety and complexity of a sheet of copy paper.

Now, you don’t need much of an excuse to have a party and drink wine. And if that excuse happens to be that it’s the stroke of midnight on the third Thursday of November, well, that’s as good an excuse as I’ve heard anywhere else. But this is cheap, young wine. No need to get excited about it. So to Beaujolais Nouveau, I say “Merci, mais non.” I’ll stick with my Big Italians; my Chiantis and Dolcettos and Sangioveses and Valpolicellas and Montepulcianos.