Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!

Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant poster art
 depicts Beaujolais Nouveau harvest.

Every year, I look forward to the third Thursday in November.

It's Beaujolais de Vendange, or Harvest Beaujolais. 

"Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!" 

On November 15, this year's Beaujolais Nouveau was released across the world. On Saturday night, my wife and I enjoyed a glass of the 2012 ultra-natural Beaujolais Nouveau, purchased earlier in the day at Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant in Berkeley, California, with our home-cooked dinner of risotto with pesto and peas.

It was serious fun, but it made our meal most enjoyable.

Beaujolais Nouveau is a red wine made from Gamay grapes produced in the Beaujolais region of France. It's a young wine (usually only six to eight weeks old) that not only is fruity, but also light-bodied and virtually tannin-free. It is an easy-to-drink wine that is popular with Thanksgiving meals, but could just as easily be enjoyed with pizza, too. While it may be ridiculed by some wine critics, it's beloved by the masses. 

2012 Beaujolais Nouveau

Each year, Beaujolais Nouveau is released starting at a second past midnight on the third Thursday in November (and no date earlier, as per French law) that has become custom and tradition, as some 65 million bottles are trekked to Paris for distribution throughout the world in any means reasonable ~ from jets to elephant runners.

This year's Harvest Beaujolais enjoyed its world-wide debut last Thursday. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, each year, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant always receives its shipment of the Beaujolais Nouveau from France in time to sell it on the date of its official release for about $18 per bottle.

"Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive!"

Indeed, and as American wine importer Kermit Lynch proclaimed in his newsletter promoting Beaujolais Nouveau 2012: "Undeniably the most thirst-quenching day of the year!"

Poster art image courtesy of Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2012.
Photo image of 2012 Beaujolais Nouveau courtesy of Grapelive.com.