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| Wednesday 11/5 6-8 pm no reservations needed $15 + 10% off any Beaujolais in the shop |
| Château Cambon Beaujolais Blanc 2023 Château de Javernand Pét-nat rosé 2024 Jean Foillard Beaujolais-Villages 2023 Domaine Thillardon “Vibrations” Chénas 2023 Château de Javernand Chiroubles Vieilles Vignes 2023Lost in thought, you wander down a street, moving from point A to point B, and never register what’s before your eyes. And then one day, everything changes. I had that experience not long ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I’d always impatiently power through the Greek antiquities collection, hurrying on my way to someplace else in the museum. There’s a wall carving in the collection that I’d pass by on these visits, glancing at it and likely muttering some banality, “pretty,” until one day, I halted and realized what I’d been passing by. This carving is a near-life-size, flattened, three-dimensional carving of a maenad, a female celebrant of Dionysian rites, scarcely clothed and in an ecstatic pose. It’s a powerful message about wine drinking from a world not of our own, with gods other than our own, one in which drinking wine, at least for some, was never a guilty pleasure, but part of their spiritual practice. The woods, at certain times of the year, populated by half-naked folks celebrating their god with watered-down wine, song, and fennel fronds, is as far from the uptight, Protestant ethic that is deeply interwoven into our culture as I can imagine. The Greeks of antiquity celebrated Dionysus with wine: the same impulse is at work in the yearly release of Beaujolais nouveau in France, albeit in a context stripped of ecstatic, spiritual significance. If you’ve been in Paris on the third Thursday of November, it’s impossible to escape the ecstatic revelry of people drinking Beaujolais nouveau, and often a bit too much of it. This annual, secular ritual, now exported throughout the world, exploits the old agrarian carnival, celebrating the changing of the seasons by tasting the first wines of the year, and turns it into a marketing imperative. Ok, that’s a bit bitchy and cynical, and far be it from me to crap on someone else’s pleasure. Still, the truth is that beyond the clatter of the marketplace, Beaujolais nouveau, dreadful mass-market, industrial dreck or not, taints the entire reputation of Beaujolais writ large. For folks of a certain generation, Beaujolais begins and ends with nouveau, casting the lot as a wine with an expiration date, to be consumed not long after release. That sad fact is one that I confront and try to overcome nearly every day in the shop, as the good stuff we peddle can be just as seductive and in some cases as ageable as many other wines deemed more worthy. And, lest we forget, Beaujolais is the home of Jules Chauvet and the nucleus of modern natural wine, with vignerons practicing this idiom in increasingly refined and delightful ways. For this week’s tasting, we’re sampling a range of Beaujolais wines that are militantly not nouveau. We refuse to carry Beaujolais nouveau because, for a couple more bucks, you get the real deal, and that’s what we’re aiming for with this week’s tasting. What we have for you are a spectrum of expressions, ranging from a beautifully crafted Beaujolais blanc, a dry, fizzy gamay-based pét-nat that is from Beaujolais but cannot be referred to as such, a village wine from one of the fathers of modern natural wine, and two wines from the northern part of Beaujolais appellation, where wines assume their “cru” (designated growing area) moniker, and don’t specify Beaujolais on the label. In the spirit of Beaujolais, we’re offering 10 percent off all Beaujolais on our shelves on the night of the tasting. |