Beaujolais

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Beaujolais – a refuge for impecunious wine lovers

With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine wanker’ who ran the London marathon, stopping every mile to taste a wine blind and guessing most of them right. Now we have the inevitable book; and while Gilbey isn’t an elegant prose stylist in the manner of Oz Clarke, Thirsty: 100 Great Wines and Stories (Square Peg, £20) is an enormously entertaining read. It’s part memoir, part guide to wine. The author comes from wine royalty.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Beaujolais is the ideal summer wine

From our US edition

It’s been a while since we have traveled to Beaujolais, that ancient wine growing region along the Saône River north of Lyon. Since summer is nigh, it’s time for another visit. Beaujolais is an ideal summer red wine. It is almost always made exclusively from the Gamay grape, a cross between Pinot Noir and an ancient white varietal called Gouais. It is light, flowery, full of pleasing acidity and fruitiness, satisfying by itself and notably food friendly. Of course, anyone who writes about Beaujolais these days has to begin by issuing a little advisory, like the Surgeon General’s warning on packs of cigarettes and certain medications. A few decades back, Beaujolais was plagued by scandal.

beaujolais

Monday

Marianna Hunt

Can Beaujolais take on Burgundy?

You could say the British were to blame. The dramatic rise and subsequent fall of Beaujolais has its roots in the early 1970s, when Sunday Times wine correspondent Allan Hall laid down a challenge for his readers. The first to go to Beaujolais, in eastern France, and bring him back a bottle of that year’s just-pressed wine (known as Beaujolais nouveau) would win a bottle of champagne.  Readers rose to the challenge, enlisting cars, trucks, private jets and even parachutes and an elephant as they rushed to be first. The Beaujolais Run became an annual institution, and local vignerons frantically planted new vines to meet demand.

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

The thrill of the Beaujolais Run

‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over to Burgundy in their Aston Martins and Jaguars, fill up with Beaujolais and roar back home. The idea for a race across France was cooked up by Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann in 1970. It really took off in 1974 when the Sunday Times offered a prize to the first person to bring a case of wine back to the newspaper’s offices following its release at midnight on the third Thursday in November.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The bucolic Beaujolais

From our US edition

To every thing, saith the Sage of Ecclesiastes (and Pete Seeger), there is a season. There is a time for white tie and tails, footwear by Lobb, and the impeccably tailored business suit or long satin frock with appurtenances from Tiffany. There is also a time for lounging about in loose-fitting cotton trousers and boat shoes. You have on your artfully battered panama hat and sunglasses, and that book you are reading, while full of pictures and conversations, as Alice would have demanded, boasts charm, not charts or spreadsheets. Its story will not be on the test. It’s the same with wine. There is a time for the exquisite Montrachet or Cheval Blanc, the Bollinger RD, Krug, or Dom Pérignon.

Beaujolais

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Wines of turkey

From our US edition

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, and not only because it offers an excuse to dine lavishly among friends. It also provides an occasion to live up to its name and give ourselves the pleasure of correcting Aristotle. Man, the old Greek said in a distracted moment, is the rational animal, ζῶον λόγον ἔχον. Clearly, what he meant to say is that man is the ungrateful animal, ζῶον αχαριστίαν ἔχον. Since Thanksgiving is all about enumerating one’s blessings, it is one of those rare opportunities in which everyone’s favorite pastime, virtue-signaling, can be indulged while thoroughly enjoying oneself.

turkey thanksgiving