"Stooopeed Americains!!"
If you’re a frequent wine drinker, right about this time of the year (the 3rd Thursday of November) you’ve probably already been bludgeoned to death by the French marketing campaign slogan: “Le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!”
Well, before you try memorizing that phrase, here’s another one for you: “Ne sois pas trompé !!”
(more info after the jump)
In other words, “Don’t be fooled!”
If you don’t already know, there is nothing extraordinary about this wine, it won’t blow you away at your first sip and it certainly won’t alter your oenological life as you know it.
Long story short, it’s an average wine with an above average marketing campaign:
The Beaujolais Nouveau phenomenon began as a local wine-maker’s custom and then grew, through a brilliant marketing strategy, into a global success story, with some 62 million bottles sold at its peak, in 1998.
A ‘premature wine’ that is fermented for only a few weeks, Beaujolais Nouveau was originally produced so that local wine-growers and their friends could celebrate the end of the Beaujolais harvest.
However, some wine merchants, such as Georges Duboeuf, soon recognized its marketing potential, and they set up a race to Paris to deliver the first bottles of the wine to the capital.
By 1970, this had become a national event. By 1985, the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau was an international ritual, with the third Thursday in November established as the official delivery date.
A French friend once told me that the marketing of the beaujolais nouveau was actually a ploy by the government to artificially increase the value of the wine.
Conspiracy theories aside, what is certain is that lately the world appears to be finally realizing that it has been enculé‘d all along. Recently, in an article by Siegfried Mortkowitz, he notes that sales of the so-so wine has been dropping dramatically:
In the United States, for example, sales declined from an estimated 4 million bottles in 2002 to 2.5 million last year. …. In 2002, Germans consumed 7 million bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau; in 2007, that number had shrunk to just 2.1 million.
In fact, Mortkowitz’ article goes on to quote a wine dealer as saying that the party could be over “in the not-too-distant future”.
Grâce à Dieu.
Filed under: Opinion | Tagged: Wine, beaujolais, nouveau, marketing, ploy, campaign, france, declining, sales
