Mon dieu! One of the few certainties in life used to come on the third Thursday of November, when wine bars around the world would announce that Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive, and pour glasses of fresh, fruity, generally undistinguished red wine. Not this year.
Suddenly convinced they have to change their image, Beaujolais producers seem to have launched their own version of New Coke.
Arguing that they had to address a younger audience in a language other than French, they're calling this year's release "It's Beaujolais Nouveau Time". Supporting the promotion is a disastrously cheesy franglais website, www.beaujolaisnouveautime.com replete with unforgiveable misspellings ("Wenesday") and undecipherable mistranslations ("because it's an appointment").
Franck Duboeuf, whose family company markets a quarter of all the Beaujolais Nouveau sold in the US, starred in a comically misconceived promotion, a New York appearance with those exemplars of modern fashion and wine marketing: French can-can dancers.
Worse, though, is that this year's wine is unlike any Beaujolais in recent memory. It's not bad; far from it. But it has no banana esters, no cardamon or nutmeg aromas, not even any of the bright cherry flavors characteristic of Beaujolais. What happened?
Dubeouf's secret used to be that he would let hundreds of individual growers ferment their own harvest but insist that they use his strain of yeast. (The yeast, in the carbonic maceration process used to ferment Beaujolais Nouveau, determines the flavor profile.) Did that change this year?
No one's talking, but the company's new marketing slogan is "Just Du It."
