Beaujolais Nouveau, Anyone?

The first shipment of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau, a type of French wine that only Japanese people seem to like, arrived the other day at Narita Airport with much fanfare:

A total of 3,500 cases of the wine, containing about 40,000 bottles, arrived at the airport on a special Japan Airlines cargo flight from Paris, and a customs inspection was performed. Under French law, the wine cannot go on sale until the third Thursday of November, which this year falls on Nov. 15.

Beaujolais Nouveau is produced from new grapes harvested each autumn in the Burgundy region of France. This year, fine weather prevailed throughout the harvesting season between the end of August and the beginning of September, providing ideal conditions for the grapes to mature.

Major retailers and other firms handling the wine say that about 8.4 million 750 ml bottles of the wine will be imported.

Have you ever tried Beaujolais Nouveau?

http://tofusando.blogspot.com Akoua Doffou

My dad loves Beaujolais Nouveau, and he’s not Japanese.
http://aloha3.wordpress.com raindrop

you’re right Beaujolais is not a noble wine. it’s only for the sake of the event.

Here in Lyon, France, the day of the beaujolais nouveau, bar tenders offers one glass of beaujolais to everyone.

So you’ve got people going from one bar to another all night long, drinking for free and puking on the pavement.
http://www.transpacificradio.com/ Garrett

One of my favorite humorous Tokyo images will always be the snacks and small izakaya of Shimbashi that kept Beaujolais Nouveau for years – in the fridge, of course – and served it at wildly inflated prices to seedy businessmen sporting gold Chanel watches encrusted with diamonds and accompanied by the stupidest, biggest-haired, most obnoxious hostesses in Tokyo.

It kind of encapsulates everything that’s wrong with all the Beaujolais Nouveau hoopla. It’s not great wine, it’s not awful wine – it’s a bit overpriced for what it is, but the demand’s there. But it’s the kind of thing that’d be nice if you were there when the first grapes were dumped in a winemaking village. The wine, in and of itself, isn’t special at all.

It’s brilliant marketing, though. Make a law that a famous wine can only go on sale on or after a certain date. Japan gets to be the first to buy something French? How could any pretentious social climber with more money than brains resist? Now it’s a trend, which means the hype’ll be with us for most of our lives.
404error

the beaujolais is awesome(ok some years are better than others but its still a good wine)
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but the bottles for japan sure have a weird labeling desing^^

sry for double post
http://japanjin.blogspot.com/ Xylo

Excellent comment, Garrett.
“How could any pretentious social climber with more money than brains resist?”

And of course that applies to a lot more than just the wine.
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Beaujolais Nouveau, Anyone?

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