Heat and haze promise splendid vintage

The hand that holds the tastevin today is all atremor

The hand that holds the tastevin today is all atremor. On the third Thursday in November every year, that piece de resistance of sublime haute chic is released to titillate the palate of a waiting world. Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive!

Beaujeau is a little village in the foothills of the mountains in the Rhone district of Burgundy. The principal grape of the area, the Gamay Noir, is a variety which, in other parts of France, produces a gauche, somewhat indolent and gloomy wine of negligible merit. But when grown in the igneous soil around Beaujeau it provides a fruity, vivacious little vintage that is very recherche. The adolescent Beaujolais nouveau has an annual cachet all its own.

Like every other wine, Beaujolais nouveau has its good years and its bad, and in this context the weather is of prime importance. Plenty of sunshine, warmth and a modicum of rain are vital.

Sustained warmth provides grapes with a high sugar content for conversion into alcohol, producing therefore a full-bodied wine with a high alcoholic content. Cooler conditions, result in a crisper, fresher-flavoured wine of high acidity.

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Extremes, however, are very undesirable: too hot a summer gives a burnt taste to the wine, while cold rainy weather leads to a poor vintage with very high acidity. Frost in spring or autumn is intolerable, and strong winds inhibit pollination at the time of flowering.

The year 2000 has been, by all accounts, a splendid year for Beaujolais, and from beginning to end the vintage has benefited from ideal weather. "The sun," according to one ecstatic lover of the vine, "sometimes hazy, but more often radiant and warm, gave the berries a succulent, delicious taste, and the rotation of the chilly early mornings with the intense heat of the afternoons created excellent conditions for a splendid vintage."

Unlike last year in the region, when the grapes apparently ripened very rapidly and matured all at the last moment, the process in 2000 has been long and gradual, starting back in mid-July.

This year has been characterised by "the gradual storing of the sunshine in the grapes, thus giving them more depth and substance."

The harvest was also exceptionally early. Again according to our expert: "This is only the third time in my professional life that I have seen a harvest beginning at the end of August. The first time was a long time ago, in 1947, when the wine was said to be the best this century. The second was in 1976, the famous Year of the Drought."

Beaujolais nouveau 2000, so it seems, is well worth waiting for.