Tuesday, November 22, 2016

All in a name

It's a funny name for a wine, and it kind of means what you'd think. According to the producer's web site, the name represents what the ripe grapes seemed to be doing at harvest time, their juice bursting forth in abundance. Interesting imagery, to say the least.

We drank a Pisse-Dru nouveau with our pizza on Sunday. On the left is a bottle of pizza oil flavored with hot peppers.

But the wine is generally good. We're drinking this year's new wine and I find nothing to complain about. Except this: I've noticed over the years that Beaujolais nouveau is becoming more and more like the normal releases, almost indistinguishable (at least to me) from what might be sold later in the season. I remember drinking nouveau in the 1980s when it tasted thick and chalky, not at all like a finished gamay. That's what made it interesting. New wine was supposed to be unfinished, a preview of what the vintage might become later. Perhaps the making of Beaujolais has improved over the years such that both the new wine and the regular release are much better than they ever have been.  Or has there been a deliberate effort to make the new wines more palatable to sell more? I have no idea, of course, but if the new wine tastes just like the future release, what, then, is the point?

4 comments:

  1. We have an allotmenting friend called 'Drew....
    who likes a tipple or two...
    we used to get him a bottle of this each year!!
    He is an outrageously 'OUT' person...
    and he had the pinkest allotment plot out...
    the fact that the early Pisse-Dru labels were very pink tickled him no end!!
    He loved the stuff...
    and, possibly as a result, now runs a bar in Barcelona!!
    This years label seems very "quiet"... are they getting posh?

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  2. What, indeed!
    It's all lost on me, Walt. I don't really taste any difference in wines.

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  3. I'm with Judeet.
    Love the wine label!

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  4. Like Judeet, I'm not very discerning when it comes to wine. I can tell you what I consider good or bad, but would probably not notice subtle differences. On the other hand, I wouldn't drink just any old pisse-dru.

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