You ever hang out with somebody who's never seen the Goonies, and you get to taste the Goonies with them? Gross. Tasting the Goonies. Tastes like Baby Ruth and Rocky Road. This is a B2B Quick Sip, B2B Quick Sips. I'm Greg, I do Communications at Binny's. Hi, I'm Chris, I do wine, and I take the Quick Sips. Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick sips all the time. Constantly Quick Sipping. And I'm Lexi, I'm on social. Jim, come here, kids. Okay. That's us. That's who you have on board. Today happens to be one week before Thanksgiving Day. Happy week before Thanksgiving Day, everyone. The Thursday before Thanksgiving in the wine world means one thing, it's the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau, Beaujolais est arrive. How do you say it? Yeah, sounds about right, but terribly pronounced. Okay, say it for real. No, you mock me mercilessly for saying something in Italian last time. I know, if Alicia was here, she would just go, wee, ma chan. Lexi, you've never tasted a Beaujolais Nouveau before. No, I don't even know what this is. Don't even know what it is. I haven't heard of this. So Lexi was, what's the deal with Beaujolais Nouveau? That's exactly how I say it. Everyone's jaws dropped. Lexi is a 1980s comedian, all of a sudden. Yeah, who's never had Beaujolais Nouveau. So Chris, walk us through this. Okay. The first thing you'll notice is that the vintage on the bottle is 2024. 2024. The second thing you'll notice is that it's from the Northern Hemisphere, because we might have some Sauvblancs that say 2024. Absolutely. From the Southern Hemisphere because spring was a ways back or fall was. Fall, they harvested in our spring. But they picked these grapes like four weeks ago. Yeah, a matter of weeks ago, hence the Nouveau part. Yeah, that's the whole thing here. This is a premier wine, a wine that is released in the same year of its production in the Northern Hemisphere. Beaujolais is not the only place to do this, actually. There are quite a few places in France who also do this, but and in Italy and in Spain, they call it Hoven there or Vino Novello, I think, in Italy. These are all words for new. Yeah. It's all new wine. Hoven means young also, sorry. Yes, Hoven means young, thank you. But this happens to be Beaujolais, which is a huge thing globally or has been mostly on the back of this gentleman right here, Georges Dubouef, who is now... George of Beef. George of Beef. I'm just doing all the translating for everyone out there. Georges Cote Dubouef. Yeah, he's a famous vigneron in Beaujolais who, in the 80s, really made this a huge international event. However, this is a tradition going back hundreds of years where they would celebrate the harvest in Beaujolais by making wine very quickly and not even bottling it, of course, just drinking it out of casks at big parties. And yeah, it became a thing. Instead of a party, we're going to do it in the conference room. Let's pop the cork and pass. Pop and pass. I will pop the cork. Listen. Just kidding. It was a screw cap. Now under screw cap. Yeah, that's good for freshness. Well, Chris, let's talk about this label. Okay. Because the labels change every year. This one does. Yeah. Always very colorful and bright. Yeah. Like the wine. They will send fine silk ties, scarves, cravats. Yeah. With that year's label design, of course. This one has gold foil. I like that touch. It's vibrant and spring-like and fun. Chris, have you ever gotten a pair of suspenders? I have not, nor have I gotten a bow tie. What about a cover bun? Chris is a cravat and suspenders kind of guy. I am. I like to watch myself cravat, too. If there was a cute little silk scarf, I'm going to skip right over. I did. I did. If there was a cute little silk scarf, I would wear it. Yeah. Yeah. Better than Hermes by a long shot. Beaujolais is part of Burgundy. It's at the southern end. However, Burgundy proper uses mainly pinot noir for the reds. This is Gamaynoir or what they would call more formally Gamaynoir Auge Blanc. It has white juice from a black grape, which is very typical. I don't know why they bother saying that. I don't know of a Gamaynoir Auge Rouge, so I don't know why. However, it's a fruity, it's a delightful grape. This is made through a technique called carbonic maceration, where they put the grapes as whole berries into a giant sealed container filled with carbon dioxide, which begins fermentation internally in the grapes. It's an enzymatic transformation that produces a small amount of alcohol, lots of esters, and it's very, very fruity. They also tend to pitch a certain yeast that produces tons of esters. What we expect here is very light, almost no tannin, bright acidity. Super fruity, strawberry, banana juice. Super fruity. Yeah. So the nose is really informed by the esters. Bananas, pear drops, as they used to say. Dive in. You're supposed to just drink it and have fun. We're going to think about this more than anyone has ever thought about Beaujolais Nouveau. You'll notice this is a little cool. The back of the bottle says serve at like 55, 57 degrees, which is about cellar temperature. It smells like pear drops. That's some esoteric British person candy that Chris and Roger know. But to me and you, it smells like banana runs. Right. Exactly. So this wine happens to go well with Thanksgiving. It does. So interestingly, Beaujolais became an appellation in 1937, but they started releasing early wine, Premier wines in the 50s. But the original release date was in December. But now conveniently, it's always a third Thursday of November corresponding directly with our Thanksgiving, always a week ahead. Yeah. It's a wine that is so easy, so lacking in tannin, you don't have to worry about the structure getting in the way of anything. It's just fruity, fun, and it does happen to pair with the vast array of flavors on the Thanksgiving table pretty well. This is not meant to be anything to contemplate or take seriously. It's literally what the French would call glu glu. It's gluggable, and it's meant to be enjoyed heartily and joyously, just to say, hey, the harvest is over, the grapes are all in, our jobs are done. You got to let the serious wine rest in the cellar, and we're going to have a party. If you like this, wait until you see what happens next spring. Right. Yeah, because I mean, Beaujolais as a broader region makes some really incredible wines. We tried one the other day on the podcast about our, what was that? Alicia's favorite of the 50 and the 50, 50 and the 50. Great, great Beaujolais crews. So there are 10 villages that are known as the crews, and they all have slightly different terroirs and produce wines of different styles. Some are very, very serious and age worthy. Some are a little fruitier, more like this. None of them are this fruity. Mostly they're made through semi-carbonic maceration, which, you know, in other parts of the world, they would just call that whole berry or whole cluster fermentation because it sounds fancier. So that happens in Burgundy proper. It does accentuate fruit, but it's not as fruity as this. There are some producers who use traditional fermentation methods with no carbonic maceration at all. It's not going to knock your socks off. It's just fun. Yeah, it's fun. It's light. It's a little bit lighter. If you like sangria, you don't even have to put fruit in there because it already tastes like fruit juice. It does. Yeah, it is very light. They're not trying to extract tannins. In fact, a lot of producers who make this style use a heating method that extracts a lot of color. You'll notice how magenta-purple this is. It's really beautiful, youthful, pretty color that you don't see in any kind of wine other than really, really young wines. The heating technique effectively extracts this bright color but doesn't extract a lot of tannic structure, so it's just all fruit and fun. That's it. This is a much maligned style by people who take wine very seriously, but even serious drinkers don't have to take wine that seriously. Taking the serious is missing the point. Yeah. Exactly. Dismissing it is missing the point too. It's not supposed to be one of the world's greatest wines. It's supposed to be one of the world's most joyous wines. It's a quick party wine. Yeah. Someone says, bring red wine to the party. You're on the holidays and you said, all right, here you go. Its life is as fleeting as anything else too. It's this ethereal little Mayfly of a wine that shows up and you drink it for a couple of weeks and then it's gone. Yeah. That's it. That's all it's about. However, I would say the esters start to fade a little bit, all that fruitiness, a little bit over time and it does not hold together for very long. But if you find yourself sitting on a bottle or two when spring or early summer rolls around, it is a fantastic picnic wine. Chill it down, take it outside, eat it with simple foods. It's great. Now you know the rest of the story. Nope, we're not doing that. Anyway. I'm Paul Harvey. Today. Good day. Release day is today. Chances are, if you go to Binny's Beverage Depot and ask at the wine desk, they probably have a bottle open and they'll let you try it. What is the cost of this bad boy? On sale right now for 10.99. We used to get sometimes up to 10 skews of this stuff. We're really focused on Dubouef these days. I think the whole pandemic threw everything way off and we just focused. But Barb did buy another wine from Chermette, a very fine producer that we don't even know. It may be labeled as Nouveau, but they're calling it Premiere, which is the same thing. I mean, basically, why they would choose not to brand it as Beaujolais Nouveau, is anybody's guess. Maybe to distance themselves from the trend as a series because it is a very serious producer. Or maybe it says Nouveau right on the bottle. We don't even know yet. Crazy. But anyway, there will be at least one other 2024 Beaujolais on the show. All right. B2B Quick Sip. That was number one. We've got more coming in the future. Hey Jim, until next time, keep sipping.