I hope you have a chance to read my new column on 2007 cru Beaujolais, because I think I make an important point: Too much of what we think about wine is simply parroted from the textbooks and endlessly repeated.
Case in point: cru Beaujolais. For decades if not centuries, we have thought of Beaujolais as a simple, light-hearted, fun, good-doggy kind of wine. All you have to do is tap the Beaujolais button on the keyboard and the clichés spew forth.
But are they still true? Sometimes. Much of the Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages still conform to the simple, fun wine description. Some cru Beaujolais does, too. But the clichés are emphatically no longer true for the artisanal cru Beaujolais that is now setting the pace for the entire appellation, and for the producers I wrote about in my column, and in previous stories.
The best of these wines retain the joyousness that is at the heart of the gamay grape, but it is time to recognize that they are much more than that. They are complex, multi-layered, graceful, delicious wines that are nonetheless true to the spirit of Beaujolais. They are, in two words, serious wines, even though everybody knows Beaujolais is not a serious wine.
The evolution of Beaujolais is a fascinating story, partly because it is rooted in desperation. The region pretty much crashed in the last 20 years, and most people in Beaujolais short of Georges Duboeuf blame the success of Beaujolais nouveau, which resulted in a great deal of overproduction and bad grape-growing and winemaking habits. These came back to bite Beaujolais when the market for nouveau faltered.
Today, serious producers of this so-called un-serious wine are leading the way to the rebirth and reevaluation of the region. Sooner or later, somebody will come along to rewrite the textbooks.
The situation with Beaujolais requires that we question other bits of conventional wisdom. Last year I wrote a column taking issue with the endlessly repeated notion that red Burgundy is a minefield. What other wine truths need to be re-examined?
