Consumer Law

Globalization and the Beaujolais

By Alan White

By Alan White

Beaujolais wine, pressed from Gamay grapes grown on the hills above the Saone valley, has never had the pretention of its neighboring Burgundy Pinot Noirs to the North or Rhone Grenache/Syrahs to the south. In its heyday it was the wine of the Paris bistrot, served by the glass to accompany a steack Bercy or saucisse frites. Beaujolais had a burst of popularity in the 1980s when fashionable London and New York restaurants raced to serve the first Nouveau of the harvest. In those days the vignerons planted every available hillside, even on the North slopes usually reserved for cow pastures.

Lately Beaujolais has not been selling well.

The prices no longer justify the arduous work of climbing up and down hillsides to spray and prune the vines. This year, hailstorms have made a mess of the crop. Some of the best locations, on sunny south-facing slopes with the perfect sandy soil rich in minerals that give the grapes their flavor, are now being left fallow. The government is paying vignerons to pull up the vines, in an effort to prop up prices. The hillsides have lost some of their beauty, with tidy rows replaced by ugly piles of uprooted plants, and rows of stakes left behind like markers in a graveyard.

Although they remain loyal to their favorite wines, even French consumers are buying wines from Spain, North Africa, Chile and Australia. In the Beaujolais, they complain that mediocre grapes grown en masse can be tricked up with sugar and chemicals to provide consumers with the consistent sameness they seem to crave in their Chardonnays and Cabernets. In the process, the endless variety and unpredictability of the wine, they tell me, is endangered.

Making Beaujolais is certainly not efficient, although each vintner no longer makes his own wine in ancient oak presses, but is more likely to bring his grapes to the coop with the latest stainless steel equipment. Even with modern technology, the wine here cannot be made as cheaply as elsewhere, nor can it command the premium prices of its more prestigious rivals to the north and south.

Some of my cousins ponder the opportunity to buy the fallow vineyards at bargain prices, hoping the market cycle will come around and that vines can be replanted in a few years. Others imagine that the fields will gradually make way for summer cottages for Europeans flocking to the sunny south of France.

Here in the Beaujolais, it is the season for blackberries and currants, with the hazelnuts coming soon. My family has been coming here for many generations. As timeless as it seems, the Beaujolais has always been subject to the whims and the progress of the market, from the disappearance of the multicrop economy with its cows, goats, ducks, and rabbits, to the arrival of indoor plumbing and television (although thankfully not the internet, yet.) But there have always been vineyards, and now it seems that the global marketplace and the imperatives of cheap and plentiful product may consign these vineyards to our photos and memories. So if you see a bottle of Beaujolais, even if it?s pricier than two-buck Chuck, give it a try.

I promise to get back to writing about ?la crise des subprimes? next week.

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on August 13, 2008 (boomark / email).