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A long hot summer never tasted as smooth as it does in the first glasses of the 2003 Beaujolais nouveau poured around Tampa Bay on Thursday.
The endless summer - among the most brutal in French history - shriveled grapes and shrank harvests all over France, but the quality of the first red wines of the vintage are one of the best Beaujolais in memory.
Georges duBoeuf, one of France's largest and best-known French wine merchants who is known as the king of Beaujolais, called it the best of his career. Bouchard and Drouhin have been just as excited - and they may be right.
The nouveau, rushed to market only a few months after picking, went on sale for about $10 a bottle Thursday around the Tampa Bay area and throughout the wine-drinking world in a heavily hyped event that is both a joyful rite of fall and a special occasion for snobbery. Some snobs scrutinize the nouveau as an omen for the rest of the year's wines; others snip that it's a cheap thin wine undeserving of such attention.
While the sniffs and sneers have been in the ascendancy, a noontime tasting of the first nouveau unloaded at Vintage Wine Cellars in Tampa proves them out of step this year.
Sampling Beaujolais from duBoeuf, Drouhin, Mommessin and Dupeuble, four of perhaps 10 labels that eventually will reach local shelves, showed the 2003 vintage to be deliciously easy-drinking reds. These nouveaus have big expansive aromas, bouquets of flowers, bananas and sweet fruits, bright colors and smooth texture but surprisingly robust and full-bodied flavors that combine cherries and berries with more peppery spices.
They could win back Beaujolais's good name, serve as a good omen for the rest of France's 2003 wines, and may tempt some of the anti-French boycotters. That would be an achievement for a wine that never aimed to be much more than a good house wine. It's made from gamay grapes that grow in an area between two much better known wine regions, Burgundy and the Rhone valley.
By the 1960s even London wanted some and the French government started setting a date for the release; the fad spread to the United States in the 1980s where it made a fine turkey wine for Thanksgiving. By the end of the 1990s Beaujolais was overproduced, oversold and overpriced; in 2002 a French wine judge called it execrable in a very earthy way in a French magazine, which was followed by a libel suit - and a lousy vintage in 2002.
Enter the strange weather of 2003, which burned a very different brand into the grapes. Even the spring had frosts that killed blossoms before they could fruit; hail in June and July destroyed more young grapes.
Ultimately it was the endless summer heat, which killed thousands of people, and the lack of rain that marked the season, cutting harvests by 30 to 50 percent and ripening the remaining grapes remarkably early.
Pickers rushed into the fields Aug.12 and 13, a month earlier than usual and two weeks ahead of the earliest harvest on record, 1893. DuBoeuf, whose firm makes the bulk of Beaujolais exported to the United States, was summoned back from Florida where he was visiting his friend and neighbor, chef Paul Bocuse in Orlando.
Grapes were, in duBoeuf's words, "gorged on the sun." The ripe grapes were small, thick-skinned and dark red, with high sugar and relatively low acids. When crushed they would make less juice but give the wines dark color, soft textures, intense fruit and as much sweetness as the wineries chose to give them. The early picking gave the wines an extra month to age and to be polished.
In Burgundy, the harvest started equally early, said Aleth Voarick of St. Petersburg, who just returned from her family's vineyards in Aloxe-Corton. "The wines will be softer and more elegant, not so much for keeping for a long time," Voarick said.
In a region where grapes sometimes fail to ripen and sugar must be added, the Burgundies of 2003 may need acid instead.
"All around, the producers are very happy," she said.
From Bordeaux, the reports are also of early harvests and small crops but intense reds and fat ripe whites, says Patrick Bellanger, an executive in Sarasota with the Gardinier family who own Tampa Bay orange groves and Chateau Phelan-Segur in Bordeaux. The heat did hurt much of the merlot in some areas but sauvignon grapes in the Medoc did well. "People are asking if it's as good as 2000, but it's too early to tell."
While vintages of low quantity and high quality can translate into high prices, a world wine glut has left a lot of 2001 and 2002 in inventory so prices won't climb much. The 2003 nouveau will sell initially for $8.50 to $10 for most brands, much as it has in years past when it was often nowhere as good. It is widely available in Tampa Bay wine shops and liquor stores and some supermarkets through the holidays and into the spring, when Beaujolais's better wines from 2003 start to arrive.
If some merchants, distributors and connoisseurs lost interest in nouveau, the public has not. Vintage Wine Cellars will hold a second tasting tonight. Lee Neal of Pic Pac Liquors in St. Petersburg says the opening of the nouveau, also set for tonight, is his biggest tasting of the year.
"Some people say it's not a serious wine," said Rochelle Smith of A Taste for Wine in downtown St. Petersburg. "But for me it makes wine fun and it starts the holidays."