George Dubœuf is known as King of Beaujolais, for regularly rounding up and selling some of some of the regions’ best wines. Now he’s in trouble, fined $38,000 for a crime he swears was not his fault.
To understand the pickle he’s in, it helps to get your mind around fundamental differences between the Old World wines of Europe, and the New World wines of basically everywhere else. These are generalizations, but they hold true often enough to be meaningful.
I’ll start with the gist. Imagine a door opens and in slinks a Siamese cat. She pours into the room and winds herself gracefully around your leg, her tail curling up toward your knee. You reach down to pet her, but she leaps up on a bookcase, out of reach. So you sit down and wait. Eventually, in her own sweet time, she’ll come back, even snuggling down in your lap and purring. That’s Old World wine.
Next, the door bursts open and an Irish setter comes bounding in. Dashing up to you, he plants his oversized paws on your shoulders and licks your face with his big, slobbery tongue. His tail flails back and forth, dashing Riedel decanters and Hummel figurines alike to pieces on the floor. That’s New World wine.
If Old World wines are slower to reveal flavors, it’s because they come mostly from cooler climates, resulting in subtler fruit and higher acid – the classic food wine. If New World wines explode with obvious fruit, it’s due to fertile soils and abundant sun, which builds higher sugar in grapes and higher alcohol in the resulting wine. New World drinkers sometimes have trouble grasping just what all the hoopla over European wines is about. “Is that ALL?” they think. After the dog knocks you over and tussles with your Frisbee it’s hard to change gears and pay attention to the cat.
Another difference is earth. While NW wines serve up fruit first and foremost, OW wines usually offer some variety of earth on the nose, from wet, rotting, overturned logs, to dry, dusty corrals. Wood is another clue. Barrels in Europe are mostly either the subtler French kind, or else old casks that impart little flavor. NW wines can reek brashly of vanilla and coconut, the markers of American oak barrels. As I said, there are exceptions, so if you’re a producer, please put down the noose.
Perhaps most important is the philosophical difference. The New World entered the wine business with neither experience, tradition nor shame to hinder it. NW winemakers tell the land what to do; fertilizing, draining and reworking it the way developers plop emerald golf courses over Hawaii’s black volcanic lava. Bad weather? No problem, buy grapes from a neighboring area. Not enough sun? Add sugar.
OW wines, on the other hand, are all about place. You can know quite well what “Bordeaux” tastes like without having a clue from brand to brand or year to year exactly what grapes you’re drinking. Regional styles are preserved with strict laws that govern every detail from what’s grown to how it’s watered, harvested and vinified.
Which brings us back to Dubœuf and his crime. Allegedly, one of his winemakers combined Gamay grapes from superior sites designated for Beaujolais Cru, with fruit from inferior Beaujolais Villages vineyards. He swore it was a mistake, and the offending wine was sold off in bulk. A pretty good deal for bulk buyers.
He was charged with; get this, “An effort to ensure consistent quality in all the wines.” This is a crime you won’t see on New World dockets anytime soon, but one so against the Old World grain, that they might as well have sewn a letter on Dubœuf’s coat and put him in the stocks. Oh, well, vive la difference. I think.
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