Beaujolais, Georges Duboeuf and the Evolution of Nouveau: Rudolph Chelminski Discusses His New Book(3)
Beaujolais Nouveau is arguably known as much for its innovative marketing techniques as is the wine itself. What about its marketing struck you as particularly unique or clever?
Contrary to a widely held idea, the Beaujolais never had much of a marketing budget to push its wine sales. Right up until the sixties, it was a just a relatively unimportant regional wine. It was only after Parisians began discovering it en masse that its reputation spread to the rest of France and then the world. But there were three particular factors that helped its popularity to explode. First, the name – it’s pure magic. If you put a million-dollar team of marketing geniuses together they could never come up with a prettier, more appealing and easily pronounceable name than those three little musical syllables “bo-jo-lay.” A name like that sells itself in any language in the world.
Second, there’s the fact that the gamay grape has the very particular, very rare quality of being able to make a pleasantly drinkable wine extremely young – only two months or so after pressing. This is fabulous, a unique advantage for the Beaujolais. Try that with a two-month-old Bordeaux and you’ll think you’ve got a mouthful of porcupines. Lyon, France’s second city, is right next door, and for a couple centuries Lyonnais barkeepers and restaurateurs had been in the habit of buying barrels of the new wine that had been pressed in September and serving it to their customers in November. It wasn’t until the sixties that the same custom began to catch on in Paris – but when it did it spread like wildfire. Now it’s worldwide, and Beaujolais Nouveau is served in Shanghai and New Delhi exactly the way it is in Paris or New York.
But the third marketing advantage for the Beaujolais was the best one of all, because it was the most fun, it developed tremendous publicity, and it was absolutely free. I’m speaking of the New Beaujolais Run. It started in the early seventies when a couple of English wine professionals made a bet as to which would be the first to get his carton of wine from the Beaujolais to London. They raced on the French roads to the Channel ferry, and then into London, and each one proclaimed himself the winner, of course. After their little competition got into the press more and more people joined the race in following years, and soon it became a perfect example of English eccentricity. Competitors raced in BMWs and Ferraris, assorted airplanes and hot-air balloons, in antique cars, horse carts, fire engines, you name it. It got tremendous publicity, and the Beaujolais people didn’t have to pay a cent for it – in fact they were paid to part with those cartons of wine. The New Beaujolais Run was finally outlawed when the cops stepped in and overruled all that the high-speed foolishness on French and English roads, but it had given a bonanza of publicity to the wine.
In the book you explore the role Georges Duboeuf plays in the evolution of Beaujolais Nouveau. If you had to single something out, where did he have the greatest impact?
Duboeuf has become identified to a great extent in relation to Beaujolais Nouveau, because he has been the most successful in selling it around the world. In fact some people even go so far as to say he invented it. This is a doubly false impression, because people have been drinking the new wine for at least couple of centuries, and Nouveau forms only a small part of Duboeuf’s panoply of wines. But he was smart enough to spot the fad when it was just getting under way, and he guessed rightly that it was going to grow in popularity. So he persuaded a lot of the best growers and co-ops to vinify an increasing portion of their harvests in primeur, as they call the new wine. (The difference between vinification for primeur and for normal wine is essentially a shorter maceration period.) If they made good wine, he promised, he would sell it – and sell it he did. It was almost entirely due to Duboeuf’s skills in selecting, blending and selling that Beaujolais Nouveau went worldwide.
