Wine WeeklyBeaujolais Nouveau 2005
November 17, 2005 by vinojoe
It’s here! Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!
In other words, Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived. Let’s face it, unless you have the kind of bucks that can be thrown away for Bordeaux futures, there aren’t too many dates for a wine geek to look forward to … so the third Thursday in November is a fairly special day.
If you missed the post from a few days ago, there’s a rundown answering questions all about Beaujolais Nouveau to help you understand what all the excitement is about. In a nutshell, Beaujolais Nouveau is part celebration, part preview. By tasting the very first wine of the vintage, you should get a fair idea of what the “real” Beaujolais wines will taste like when they are released in the spring/summer of the following year.
That said, let’s get to the tasting notes. The Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 shows aromas of fresh, ripe strawberry and red cherry. Fairly simple, but fresh … it certainly smells like a five-week-old wine. On the palate you get the same fresh, ripe strawberry in the flavor, mixed with red and black cherries. It really does taste like biting into a fresh strawberry. However, there is more to the wine than that.
What this wine lacks in complexity it makes up in structure and balance. The 2005 Nouveau is held together with ample, tart acidity and surprisingly ripe tannins: two elements that stay through a remarkably long finish. Why is this so surprising? Because a wine this young shouldn’t have any tannins, and only moderate acidity at best. Is this a wine to compare to a $50 Pinot Noir? Of course not, but it is much better than expected and will hold its own against other ten-dollar wines … at least for the short-term.
The grapegrowers of Beaujolais were telling us that the 2005 wines would be rivaled only by the once-in-a-lifetime “vintage of the sun” 2003. Personally, I dismissed these claims as marketing hype, but after tasting this Nouveau, I’m a believer, and looking forward to the release of Beaujolais-Village and the various Beaujolais Crus in 2006.
Until then, we have Nouveau. Enjoy this wine now through the New Year holiday. Bring a few bottles to Thanksgiving dinner, and drink it with appetizers, your first few bites of turkey, and the cranberry sauce.
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Come on Joe, Beaujolais Nouveau is generally awful muck, sought out by chumps who “think” it’s the cool thing to do. It’s rarely nice (or even fun) to drink and it doesn’t give the general wine buff an awful lot of a preview of what’s to come. In my opinion, it’s a way of getting a quick buck from fools. I’ve not met a serious wine drinker yet who would touch it. Sure, if I was in Beaujolais in November, I WOULD drink Beaujolais Nouveau, but only (as you mentioned) as a ‘celebration’ of the year to come. But I would almost certainly hate it.
You also made an interesting statement:
“…Because a wine this young shouldn’t have any tannins…”
You must be giddy from guzzling too much Nouveau Joe, as we all know, wine doesn’t get it’s tannins with age, it gets them from the skin of the grape, and therefore, has all the tannins it’s EVER going to have, right there in the bottle from day one. Sure, tannins ‘develop’ but to say a young wine shouldn’t have tannins is, well a bit daft.
Well Matt, I’ll have to go ahead and uh, disagree with you on your opinion of Nouveau. And you’ll have to retract your statement about a serious wine drinker who would touch it, because through this blog we’ve kind of met, and I’m a serious wine drinker who enjoys Nouveau!
On your tannins correction, I’ll admit the gaffe and stand corrected. I guess what I was trying to say was that a wine made and bottled in less than a month isn’t given the opportunity to spend time macerating with its skins, nor is it given any time to sit in a barrel — the two chances it has to pick up tannins. After drinking nearly a bottle of Beaujolais while writing the post, I decided “young” was the correct term. How daft of me … thank you for catching and correcting for the rest of the visitors !