Today, November 21st, marks the release of the season’s “first wine of the harvest,” Beaujolais Nouveau. As is customary, and per French law, the wine is released at 12:01 AM on the third Thursday in November. Franck DuBoeuf, who leads Les Vins Georges Duboeuf, founded by his father Georges in the early 1960s, calls the 2019 “a vintage of pleasure.”

**Franck Duboeuf and wife Anne were in New York yesterday to celebrate the annual release of the Beaujolais Nouveau wines. Pictured above with The Wine Chef.**

Franck (the man with the best hair in the wine industry!) told a group of journalists at a media luncheon that the vintage “was strongly shaped by temperamental weather.” He said that for the entire Beaujolais region 2019 was a stressful growing season with unpredictable weather patterns. “Thankfully,” noted Franck, “during harvest, the weather was perfect, with sunny and warm days that finished ripening the grapes, and cool nights that preserved the acidity.”

Read the exciting story behind the creation of the Beaujolais Nouveau phenomenon in my article “Georges Duboeuf and the Story Behind the World’s Biggest Wine Party, Beaujolais Nouveau Day” published last year on Grape Collective, excerpted below.

In the 1980s, Duboeuf began throwing big parties at his winery in Romanèche-Thorins on the night of the wine's release. There would be hundreds of guests: friends, local growers, and famous celebrities who would arrive on a special train from Paris. At midnight everyone would go outside to see the wine-laden trucks leaving the winery.
“In 1988 a famous French jockey was supposed to lead the trucks out on horseback.” says Franck, “but it was raining that night and he refused to do it. With great to-do, the American actor James Coburn got on the horse and, in his beautiful cashmere coat, said, ‘Let's go!’"

Happy Beaujolais Nouveau Day!