A Nouveau Appreciation for Beaujolais: Gamay, Reconsidered

365 Days

A Nouveau Appreciation for Beaujolais: Gamay, Reconsidered

Posted 04/05/2009 at 11:58 AM by Cathy

There are a few things to definitely know about Beaujolais:

Bottles labeled Beaujolais and Beaujolais Nouveau are two very different wines.

Beaujolais is the wine of choice at many a French bistro. The fastest way to transport yourself to that bohème frame of mind is to cook up some steak frîtes and uncork a bottle of Beaujolais.

Beaujolais is one of the least expensive red Burgundies you'll find, though you'll be cheating – just a bit – if you fail to acknowledge the distinct differences of terroir between Beaujolais and Burgundy propre. But when it comes down to the pocketbook, I say that all's fair in love and wine.

This week I had the happy opportunity to taste two non-Nouveau Beaujolais wines in sequence: first a 2007 Beaujolais from Domaine Dupeuble Père et Fils, then a 2006 Beaujolais-Villages "Chameroy" from Louis Latour. Both were less than $15 each and, though I was not within cooking distance of steak frîtes, I was nonetheless suddenly in the mood to tilt my black beret at a more jaunty angle.

Both of these wines were exceptionally easy to drink – a potentially dangerous quality in a wine – but not because they were unsubstantial or thin in any way. The first wine, the 2007 Beaujolais, had a tannic texture to it that actually made me thirsty, so that I'd take another sip and another in fairly quick succession. The second wine, the 2006 Beaujolais-Villages "Chameroy," was brighter in color and mouthfeel and it had more acidity – and generally an overall better quality – than the 2007. I would easily drink a glass of this wine, too, though perhaps not as quickly or as nonchalantly.

The difference can be attributed to several things. The second wine was Beaujolais-Villages, which is the second of three categories of classification for non-Nouveau Beaujolais wines, meaning it's a notch higher on the quality (or at least the expectation) scale. The second wine was also a year older, meaning the tannins had a slightly longer time to settle than the first wine's, which may have caused them to be less prominent.

But the lesson of the exercise, for me, was that these differences were even discernible – at this price point, that is, and with a grape treated as flippantly as gamay too often is.

These were not wines I would brood over, but that is part of the point. Beaujolais Nouveau is a wine with an immediacy about it, and with more than a hint of the celebratory (of the harvest, of Thanksgiving, etc.). Even though the wines I tasted were both non-Nouveau Beaujolais, a tinge of the Nouveau residue rubbed off nonetheless.

The celebratory aspect made me a bit giddy. The urgency of it made me want to drink more of it more quickly than I otherwise would. And the surprising contrast of the two wines rearranged my appreciation of gamay.

So far as I could tell, there was nothing tragically wrong with any of those consequences.

Email Icon E-Mail | Digg Icon Digg this! | del.icio.us
365 Days RSS | Comments RSS for this post

365 Days rss

Comments

No comments have been posted for this article.

About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.