Nothing welcomes this traveler home better than autumns release of this years newest youngest wine… Beaujolais. It is a chance to check on whether this last summer was as delicious as I remember.
Beaujolais Nouveau was lost on me until November 2001. That year I drank from a cask of Beaujolais at Nizza La Bella a neighborhood joint on San Pablo in Albany. It was all so complicated.
What happened is that I tasted youth and time. I drink wine it is as simple as that. It tastes good, it doesn’t taste good. Seldom does wine taste of youth. Rarely do I find myself thrown back upon an August nights full moon lighting a mountain ringed river bottom.
Beaujolais is like that. You can count the mere weeks since you last tasted the very same night that the grapes like you were still clinging to the vine. August nights of love and romance and it is so fleeting, so sweet and like everything vanishes into the next moment and becomes past until this youthful wine jolts you back into the prime of all primes those sultry late August end of summer nights.
Beaujolais is for me sentimental and I am if nothing else entirely too sentimental. I am a flaming sentimentalist. And gullible. I believe in keeping love and hope alive and as I plunge into the work that is winter. A winter so soon upon us there is at least this last fling to have with Beaujolais.
She is so silly. A puppy all floppy ears and ready to play while I am bundling up and hunkering down. I am reminded of imperfection and I am accounting here at the end of the year for all the glorious imperfections I have been allowed to get by with.
I will never drink Beaujolais Nouveau with any kind of gravity. I will never take my affair as anything other than a passing fling. But, that is what she is this wine. She is nothing but a one night stand and she was never meant to be anything else. To drink her and to love her for what she is and then for the rest of your autumns, all those years later as you part reluctantly with glory of the past year you may ring the minds memories one last time of that summer the gods allowed to slip through your fingers like sand.
