WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- For wine buffs, Beaujolais Nouveau is hardly a vintage to get excited about.
But for many Americans, it's increasingly becoming the vin de table of choice to go with their Thanksgiving meal. And this year, demand for the wine reached an all-time high since it started selling on the U.S. market in 1981, much to the delight of Georges Duboeuf, the French vintner that started the global frenzy for Beaujolais in the first place.
Beaujolais Nouveau takes grapes from the new vintage in the French region of that name, and turns the fruit around into a light wine that's best consumed within six months of being bottled. At about $10 a bottle, it's affordable, and because it's such so light and best drunk slightly chilled unlike vintage reds, it's also a good introduction for novices to get into the fine art of enjoying a glass of wine with a meal.
Yet the single biggest reason for the popularity of the wine isn't its taste or the fashionably designed, colorful labels Georges Duboeuf comes up with each year. Rather, it's the fact that the wine is only available after the third Thursday of November every year. The fact that the young vintage can only be had after a certain date has encouraged retailers and restaurants across the globe to make much fanfare over the fact that "Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Arrivee!" and hold special events to mark the occasion.
The French Embassy in Washington, for instance, makes a point of having a wine and cheese reception each year on the day the vintage is available to the general public, while French bistros across the nation offered menus with the Beaujolais Nouveau in mind on Nov. 18. But such festivities are tame compared to the Beaujolais phenomenon that took place in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when enthusiasts drove to Tokyo's Narita airport to greet the arrival of the wines by plane from Paris, and drink the bottles as soon as they cleared customs.
The mad rush to get to the airport to greet crates of wine land from France seems to have gone out of vogue these days, but Japan remains the world's biggest drinker of the wine outside of France. Still, the United States is doing its best to catch up.
"We saw a decline for the first time last year...but (demand) has definitely been on an upward trend," said Kathleen Talbert, a Georges DuBoeuf spokeswoman. The company has a 70 percent market share of the wine, having pioneered the mass-marketing of the vintage to tickle the imagination of drinkers worldwide.
While anti-French sentiment as a result of the Iraq war pushed down demand for all things French last year, including wines, demand for the Beaujolais Nouveau reached record levels this year, Talbert said.
She pointed out that 200,000 air-freighted cases holding 12 bottles each were pre-ordered by U.S. retailers before the Nov. 18 sales date, up 7 percent from a year ago. Sales in Los Angeles were particularly brisk, with bottles selling out on the 18th, forcing retailers to order another 500 cases by air to meet demand. Given that French wine imports in general fell 13 percent since a year ago, it's clear that Beaujolais is now a permanent word in the U.S. lexicon.
Nevertheless, orders from Japan continued to beat that of the United States, as Japanese demand reached 300,000 this year.
But U.S. drinkers might soon overtake the Japanese as the number-one fans of the wine, especially as the sales date comes only a week before Thanksgiving.
"This is a perfect wine for the Thanksgiving meal," Talbert said.
Certainly, for foodies, it's not easy to come up with a wine that matches well not only turkey, gravy, and stuffing, but also cranberry sauce, candied yam, green beans, and other fixtures on the annual feast. Moreover, given that the meal is served family-style instead of being plated course by course, making it even more difficult for discerning gourmets to arrange suitable wine pairings.
Better still for Beaujolais fans is that the price per bottle will go down about a dollar shortly after Thanksgiving, once the bottles ordered by sea arrive into the country, just in time to make it for the Christmas holiday season.
