Beaujolais Nouveau is to wine what...

Beaujolais Nouveau is to wine what introductory interest rates are to loans and money market accounts.

Hamburgers are to Beef Wellington.

... What our local pumpkins would be to vegetables -- if the pumpkins became exported around the world with heavy marketing and the encouragement of the US Dept. of Agriculture, so that a new generation of people came to think of them as a Big Deal to be eagerly awaited -- and perceived them as typical of squash.

Pumpkins are casual, slightly frivolous, often consumed locally, and have a brief season. Seldom a Big Deal. Likewise, Beaujolais Nouveau is a light, cheap, casual wine, a small side line of Beaujolais wines, consumed in pitchers in Lyon and seldom farther than Paris -- until recent decades, when it started being air-shipped worldwide with heavy marketing, in bottles, placed on a pedestal, produced in greater amounts, so that it finally distorted overseas perception of what "Beaujolais" means. (= my "squash" above.)

More on Beaujolais and its variations recently Here.

Randy: "It's the "Nouveau" part and all the noise around it that I refer to. Some people like Beaujolais, I don't particularly, but the totally artificial excitement of a non-event ..."

The biggest casualty I've seen from this marketing scheme is the blurring in the wine-drinking public's mind of the formerly sharp distinction between real Beaujolais and Beaujolais Nouveau. Randy, have you had many good, classic, rich, highly mineraled, ageworthy M-à-Vs or Morgons? Or is the last statement about Beaujolais Nouveau? Also, I don't recall Duboeuf as such a big factor when the scheme began -- it did seem that the French Ag Ministry supported the overseas promotions.

(At a Burgundy tasting this week the annual topic of the Nouveau hype came up and I remarked that if, hypothetically, I became dictator, my first decree would ban import of Beaujolais Nouveau, so that consumers could return to experiencing some of what Beaujolais used to be known for, without the silly confusing distraction.)

I thought the hype had died down, but if anything there's life in the old marketing trick.

Perhaps it's a good point to note for people in marketing - that normal punters can be persuaded to buy stuff if you associate it with an event, even if that event is artifical.

Certainly something that occurs in the upper echelons of wine enthusiasts, with anniversary bottles and the profit to be made in sourcing and supplying them. I certainly bought a birth year port (and very nice it was too!).

BojoNovo is pretty dull, but for many people so is wine - just a drink. What they've done is to make the event special & the wine take a back seat to the event.

IIRC Scott Adams had something like the following comment in his first Dilbert book "People mistakenly think Marketing people screw the customers. That's wrong. Marketing people merely hold them down, so the Sales people can screw them".

regards

Ian

inflatable "life size" dolls are to love...