Wine lovers will tell you, with a kind of disinterested snobbery, that Beaujolais’s primary function is to remind the drinker how good Burgundy is. This little appellation in eastern France comes with none of the chin-stroking seriousness of its older brother, a few miles north. It is sugary, shallow, girly and it tastes like Parma Violets – the glitter gel pen of the vintners’ universe, a wine forged in the soul of Hello Kitty or the imagination of a Polly Pocket. And it is true, Beaujolais can be so wimpy it is often hard to distinguish it from juice.
But the drink is enjoying something of a revival. It works like this: Beaujolais nouveau – a young red wine made from Gamay grapes – is rushed to market almost as soon as possible, post-harvest. At 12.01am on the third Thursday of November it is released into the world. By late morning, importers have raced it back to the UK and amateur enthusiasts descend on London’s wine bars for the very first taste. Unlike all those other cerebral Pinot Noirs down the road, Beaujolais nouveau is to be drunk immediately. And so we have Beaujolais Day. “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!” so goes the refrain. And my mal de tête will soon follow, I’m sure.
This celebration is incongruous, however, with everything else about November – a month that conspires with alarming intensity to make everyone very depressed. All that cold and dark runs counter to the frivolous, jammy spirit of Beaujolais nouveau. The effect of raising a glass in this most unsuitable of months is like eating Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam during a monsoon in Thailand. Or carving a turkey under a maypole.
So yes, Beaujolais is a summer wine – which really means it’s a lunch wine, which means, in some jurisdictions, that it’s a breakfast wine. The workers of London were out in force to test the thesis at the Three Compasses in Farringdon on the morning of Beaujolais Day. This pub, below Bouchon Racine (regularly ranked among Britain’s best restaurants), was offering a blunt menu – Beaujolais nouveau, from a tap, and a bacon sandwich. I’m here at 9.30am to meet two friends who have already settled in rather too comfortably. It is completely full; it could be 7pm. I ask several customers if they have work later. Yes, said everyone, with suspicious enthusiasm.
No one is actually here for the bacon sandwich but I should start by saying it is rather good: this is a French restaurant and I applaud the Francish addition of Dijon mustard (only the English would make up needlessly Protestant rules about limiting breakfast to ketchup). The Beaujolais? Well, I feel professionally obliged not to announce in these pages that I had a glass of wine before 10am so take this next statement as hypothetical: this year is particularly distinctive owing to the cranberry-ish direction. Heavy air quotes: I liked it. My friend – a chef at one of London’s most beloved restaurants – is on his day off. “Delicious, I might stay and have six,” he said.
But because I work very hard I had to leave – and if that sound I hear is you, reader, scoffing, then cut it out! Because only a few hours later I headed out of the office again, this time to Noble Rot on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury. I have never seen a wine bar require crowd control before – but the freezing punters on the street were there to get their hands on a free glass of the primeur. This was – and I do not use this word lightly – a throng. Still in the middle of the working day, mind you.
My Beaujolais Day jaunt did little to disabuse me of the notion that it isn’t a serious drink. But here’s the trick: if you enter into it accepting, not resisting, this fact, then you are in for a good time. And so, there I was on the coldest day of the year so far, in the most miserable of months, sipping on some Château Thivin, happy as a goddamn clam.
[Further reading: Stop perving over chefs!]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand