Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. It’s the third Thursday in November and wine drinkers will know that means the annual release of Beaujolais Nouveau – the first wines of the 2008 season – and the accompanying celebration.
Beaujolais Nouveau is made with the Gamay grape and was first created a hundred years ago in France as a wine to be drunk to celebrate the end of the harvest season. Without the addition of oak barrels and long-term aging, the wines do not have the opportunity to develop more intense characteristics and flavours but tend to be redolent of red fruit and berries – big, juicy and jammy, a wine for gulping rather than sipping, the perfect wine for a party, which is what many people will be doing this weekend with their Beaujolais Nouveau purchases.