Beaujolais Nouveau Arrival a Global Affair : Spirited Publicity Boosting Fame of French Wine

PARIS —  “It tastes like a banana--a crushed banana,” said the rotund, ruddy-cheeked man in the French peasant costume.

“To the contrary, my friend,” said his equally plump pal in the same garb, “last year it tasted like a banana. This year it tastes like wild strawberries.”

Somebody else in the group gathered on the set of a television studio in the hilly Montmartre neighborhood of Paris suggested “raspberries.” Another expert said “plums.” There were no votes for mango or soursop or kiwi fruit.

But clearly the taste of this year’s batch of Beaujolais nouveau, was elusive, albeit fruity. Much more obvious and unmistakable was the incredible promotion and hype that surrounds the annual release of the first of the red wine from this year’s harvest in the granite hills northwest of Lyon to markets all over the world.

Even the French are astonished how in a few years this previously undistinguished “countertop wine” has surpassed the stately Bordeaux and respected Burgundy to become the most famous and most consumed of all French wines. Its phenomenal success--an estimated production of 50 million bottles this year alone--is mainly because of an aggressive, spirited promotion that breaks nearly all the age-old traditions of wine.

Portrayed as a Race

“It remains the greatest marketing stroke since the end of World War II,” announced the daily newspaper Figaro in its Thursday editions, out on the streets just as Parisians were having their initial sips of wine and thus getting into the interminable fruit debates that characterize wine talk here.

“There are three rivers surrounding Lyon,” joked the Communist daily L’Humanite, “the Saone, the Rhone and the Beaujolais. But the Beaujolais irrigates the entire world.”

Indeed. The annual release of the Beaujolais nouveau at midnight on the third Thursday of November has become an event that now encompasses the globe. This year Guatemala and the West African nation of Burkina Faso were added to the list of countries that have some kind of festive uncorking to celebrate its arrival.

Beaujolais parties are set for today in most large American cities, including a huge bash at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Manhattan. In the Los Angeles area, the French-American Chamber of Commerce is hosting a Vive le Beaujolais nouveau party at the Film Land Corporate Center in Culver City.

Part of the genius of the promotion is that Beaujolais producers have successfully portrayed the release of the wine as a race, with fleets of trucks, trains and jumbo jets poised in Lyon, engines hot and ready, to deliver the new wine to a thirsty world as soon as it becomes ready to drink.

The race concept was given a boost by British journalist Allen Hall, who in 1974 offered a bottle of expensive champagne to the first person to arrive at his Fleet Street office with a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau. More than in any other country, in fact, the British have been the most creative in coming up with variations on the Beaujolais hype.

A few years ago, somebody persuaded six soldiers from the British Parachute Regiment to jump from a helicopter into the Thames River opposite the Savoy hotel in London with bottles of Beaujolais that they had rushed across the English Channel. The genius of this particular plot was that the wine would be “nicely chilled and ready for drinking” when the soldiers were fished out of the chilly river.

Beaujolais nouveau producers have a sense of humor. They have never claimed to be making a fancy wine, just one that tasted good. Before the Beaujolais nouveau concept took hold, it was the wine that was served over the counter in the local cafes, seldom venturing outside the region.

The promotion of the wine began as a modest attempt to save the region, which 20 years ago was an economic disaster area. The corner to prosperity was turned when producer George Duboeuf, “the Pope of Beaujolais,” came up with the gimmick of placing banners proclaiming: “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive”-- “The new Beaujolais has arrived”--outside cafes offering the wine.

“We are happy with our success,” said Michel DeFlache, a Beaujolais producer from the tiny town of Saint Loup who is a director with the union for wine makers in the region. “Beaujolais nouveau has helped us survive. But we have learned not to take ourselves too seriously.”

DeFlache presided over a festive unveiling of the new wine at a Paris television studio, decorated to look like a typical Beaujolais village, after it had been “welcomed” to the city at the Gare de Lyon train station earlier Thursday morning. The wine had been “rushed” to Paris via high-speed train. But DeFlache readily admitted that cases of the wine had arrived days and sometimes weeks before for storage here and in other world capitals so that it could be drunk in celebrations like the one here.

At first the Beaujolais people and their ways alienated the established, traditional wine chateaux with their promotional wiles.

Today, however, even people such as American Sacha Lichine, who presides with his famous father, Alexis, over the Chateau Prieure-Lichine, a grand cru Bordeaux wine, welcome the Beaujolais hype as a good thing for the wine business.

“I am not a Beaujolais drinker,” Sacha Lichine said Thursday. “It is not a wine that has been vinified to its full potential. But a lot of people find it fresh and appealing and I am all for anything that creates excitement for wine. It helps all of us who think there are not enough people in the world popping corks.”