About the Beaujolais Nouveau season of wine celebration

July 17, 2011

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”

That’s how the song goes, and here come the holidays. Thanksgiving is only two weeks away with Christmas and New Year’s right behind it.

Halloween is in October, and that’s too soon for me to start getting excited. And for me, Thanksgiving seems too late to start the season – it doesn’t give me enough time to be merry.

So when would you guess is my start of the holiday season? The third Thursday in November, of course. It’s always around my birthday, and it marks the most famous wine phenomenon in the world: Beaujolais Nouveau!

The annual release of the newest wine of the French vintage is received with block parties, rambunctious dinners, singing, dancing and much more fanfare around the world than any other wine. Merry drinkers around the globe make their annual purchases to the tune of 1.2 million cases in only a week’s time. By the end of the year, nearly 2 million cases of Beaujolais Nouveau will have been sold and drunk by consumers from as far and wide as Japan and the Philippines. That’s more wine than the annual production of some countries!

So what is it about Beaujolais Nouveau that puts people into a commotion? Is the wine truly that great?

The wine itself comes from an area just North of Lyon. It’s made from only the red Gamay grape. The Beaujolais district is most suitable for growing Gamay because of its granite and schist soils. Within the Beaujolais region there is also a classification of appellations that most people aren’t aware of. There are three levels. The most basic level is plain Beaujolais, which comes from virtually any vineyard within Beaujolais that is planted to Gamay. We take a step up the ladder with Beaujolais-Villages. This wine must come from one of only 38 villages that have stricter guidelines in the production and theoretically better vineyard sites. At the top of the classification are the Cru Beaujolais. There are only 10 of these villages that traditionally produce the finest wines of the region. The most famous of these being Moulin A Vent, Morgon, Fleurie and St. Amour – some very pretty names. Beaujolais Nouveau can come from any of the first two tiers and is almost always made with a particular winemaking method called carbonic maceration. I won’t bore you with the details of this $20 winemaking term, but suffice to say that the resultant wine is extremely fruity and light, and draws descriptions such as banana-leaf, pear drop and bubble gum.

Traditionally, what made Beaujolais Nouveau popular was that in the old days winemakers did not have the technology and techniques that we have today – like refrigeration, stainless steel tanks, etc. – to keep their wines from oxidizing So the earlier you bought your wine, the more fruity and enjoyable it was. It was also seen as the first indicator of the quality of a vintage. As everyone now knows, however, what may have been a great year in Beaujolais may not be as good in California, Piedmonte or anywhere else in the world.

Source: http://www.midweek.com/content/columns/vino_sense_article/the_beaujolais_nouveau_season/

Clark Wine Center was built in 2003 by Hong Kong-based Yats International Leisure Philippines to become the largest wine shop in Philippines supplying Asia’s wine lovers with fine vintage wines at attractive prices. Today, this wine shop in Clark Philippines offers over 2000 selections of fine wines from all major wine regions in the world. As a leading wine supplier in Philippines, Pampanga’s Clark Wine Center offers an incomparable breadth of vintages, wines from back vintages spanning over 50 years. Clark Wine Center is located in Pampanga Clark Freeport Zone adjacent to Angeles City, just 25 minutes from Subic and 45 minutes from Manila.

Wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone, Loire, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Alsace, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, Chile and Argentina etc. are well represented in this Clark Wine Shop.

For more information, email Wine@Yats-International.com or visit http://www.ClarkWineCenter.com