The weather's chilly, the leaves have fallen, and the holidays are fast-approaching. We're about to commemorate the end of the growing season — and the imminent end to a year that has been difficult on so many levels.
There's a wine for that: A wine of this vintage, fresh as the memory of harvest and raw as the experience of the year, unpolished by time, a reflection of the emotion of the moment.
This style of wine is called nouveau. The best known is beaujolais nouveau, released on the third Thursday of November. It's easy to dismiss beaujolais nouveau as a marketing gimmick meant to sell wine quickly. An apocryphal tasting note I haven't been able to trace to its original writer says it "smells like cash flow." But the tradition dates to the late 19th century, when the wines would finish fermenting in cask during their journey to Lyon or Paris. The modern incarnation was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by Georges Duboeuf, a leading negociant and champion of beaujolais who died in early January at 86.
Beaujolais nouveau is typically made by a technique called carbonic maceration, in which the grapes (the red gamay in beaujolais) are put in a tank with carbon dioxide to exclude oxygen. The intact grapes ferment on the inside, eventually bursting and producing effusively fruity aromas and flavors. The technique and the resulting wines are not subtle. Beaujolais nouveau tends to taste distinctively of banana. Subtlety is not the point — fun and celebration are.
Nouveau is more than just beaujolais. In Austria, the fresh vintage is celebrated at heurigen, small taverns operated by wineries, especially around the capital, Vienna. And many U.S. wineries are producing nouveau wines, not just to rush juice out the door and into their bank accounts, but to put a coda on the year and maybe just to have a little fun.
We have all experienced the emotional stress of 2020 in our own way. Enjoying a nouveau may help us come to terms with it and put it behind us.