John Brown has been a wine and food columnist in West Virginia since the 1980’s. His regular columns appear in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail under the title Vines & Vittles.
There’s more to Beaujolais than Nouveau!
Beaujolais Nouveau is a fun wine full of fresh strawberry fruit flavors (it’s only about two months old when it arrives) that is more a celebration than an exercise in fine wine drinking. Most Nouveau is relatively inexpensive (around $10 to $15 a bottle) and is meant to be drunk within the year after bottling.
In the last decade or so, importers have gotten Nouveau to the US within a day or two of its release in France, and so now we Americans also celebrate the “new” wine. In fact, a few local wine shops have Beaujolais Nouveau “barrel” tastings each November.
Today I’ll tell you about the other Beaujolais wines that, while less known, are considered far superior to Nouveau. Don’t get me wrong. I really do enjoy Beaujolais Nouveau in all its frothy, fruity glory. However, I think most folks don’t realize there are also some serious wines being made in this region just to the south of Burgundy.
Beaujolais is produced from a grape called gamay. Gamay is a lighter pigmented red grape that, when allowed to soak for extended periods on its skins, can produce a medium and, in some rare instances, full bodied wine.
Beaujolais lies just south of the Macon region of Burgundy. From there, it descends south along a 34-mile stretch of rolling hills and ends near the famous Rhone wine region of Cote Rotie. In addition to Beaujolais Nouveau, you will see wines labeled Beaujolais, Beaujolais Superior or Beaujolais Villages and these can be decent to very good wines. While I do enjoy these wines, the best of Beaujolais are much more serious wines and some can actually improve with bottle age for up to ten years.
The best wines of the Beaujolais region are known as Cru (which means “growths” in French). Crus are named after the villages around which the grapes are grown. There are ten Cru Beaujolais. You may see a wine labeled Morgon (the name of a Cru village) in large type with the year and producer (i.e., “Georges Duboeuf”) in smaller type.
The ten Cru Beaujolais are: Brouilly, Chenas, Chiroubles, Cote de Brouilly, Fleurie, Julienas, Morgon, Moulin-a-Vent, Regnie and Saint Amour. Each of these Crus produces distinctly different Beaujolais from very light and delicate (i.e., Chiroubles and Fleurie) to fuller-bodied wines (i.e., Moulin a Vent and Morgon).
Like Burgundy, it is very important to select your Beaujolais from reputable producers and shippers. Among the most prominent of these are: Joseph Drouhin, Duboeuf, Louis Jadot, Louis Latour, Prosper Maufoux, Bouchard Pere et Fils and St. Vincent. Unlike Burgundy, Cru Beaujolais is reasonable priced ($15-$30 a bottle).
In matching the wine to food, I suggest you use the Crus Beaujolais like you would a light to medium-bodied pinot noir. The beauty of the wine the gamay grape produces to me is its deep floral qualities and cherry, berry flavors. I particularly like to pair a good Moulin a Vent with roast tenderloin of pork.
