Miles Collins

Or has it? and if so, so what!!!

This week saw the arrival of the first bottles of Beaujolais at work and the response from our clientel was muted to say the least. Over the last eight or so years I have employed a number of French chefs and I am yet to employ one who has a good word to say about the pressed and bottled gamay grape. When I bore them to death with stories of English folk tearing across the Channel for the first of the illustrious young wine and how as a young chef it was an opportunity for an evening of culinary tributes to the producers and beaujolais aficionados they reply with a smirk and say something like ‘exactly’!! 

As an apprentice I can vaguely remember cooking for such occasions, I remember it as a bit of fun, a time for slightly ecentric English men and women to forget about work and dash off to some huge duty free hypermarket on the French border to bring back bottles of usually cheap and godawful wine that was, frankly, lost on me.

So what is a nouveau wine? Simply put it is the time between the harvest of that particular grape and the next one, a primeur wine is one which falls between the date of harvest and a date set by the French and/or European wine police sometime in the Spring. So if you’ve just pulled the cork on an ‘amusing and fruity’ number at your nouveau party then put a stop in it because you’re actually drinking a primeur! An AOC beaujolais isn’t allowed out to play until the fifteenth of December whilst a primeur can hit your local CO-OP a month earlier. 

Either way I am not particularly bothered, it is not a wine of choice for me but I do slightly mourn the loss of those great dinner parties, the stereotypical Englishman and his MG packed with cases of the stuff. We’re losing our heritage!!!