I recently picked up my first specific vintage year-producer combo ever. I remember drinking a really good bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages 2009 at Capital Grille a couple months ago, and found it in stores again this week and picked up a bottle.
However, Wiki says that Beaujolais Villages is meant to be drunk even sooner than most average wine, within a couple years. So should I stock up on this or will it go much worse in a year or so?
Just have a lot of picnics this Spring.
Beaujolais IS meant to be drunk while young. But 2009 is still young. You can go back as much as 10 years and still have good Beaujolais. Check out this vintage chart.
Ooh I love Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages. I did not know that it was supposed to be drunk young. I just thought that was what the store had. But you are also talking to a person that originally bought it because I thought the label was pretty.
In fact, that’s how I pick most wines.
I have to confess that I too might have a different opinion of it if it had had an Australian-style labeling which is just gaudy and Targetesque.
Thanks for the link Athena. I might pick up some more 2009 and Snarky, I definitely plan on taking it to parties in the future.
Wiki says ‘within two years of their harvest’. So I reckon if you were going to buy some, only buy what you can drink this summer.
I couldn’t help myself and opened the bottle tonight. Now I sort of wish I hadn’t because it is the most amazing wine – possibly the best alcoholic beverage this side of butterscotch schnapps – I’ve ever had – for the first 1/4 glass. The smell is just divine. But it loses its flavor pretty quickly in the glass.
I’m going to be drinking lots of 1/4 glasses over the next week.
The next week? Ouch. Hard to keep reds good for that long once they’re opened. I go a few days at most, if I keep them in the fridge. After that, almost all of them start going downhill.
Remember MOST ALL wine is meant to be consumed young, generally within a couple years of vintage.
Also, there’s more than one “style” of Beaujolais. Beaujolais Nouveau is absolutely meant to be drunk within a couple months of bottling.
Vintage and vineyard specific Beaujolais can and will acquire pleasant secondary characteristics with some bottle aging, but as a general rule of thumb, the Gamay grape that is used to make Beaujolais wine produces a very light-bodied, low tannin wine that doesn’t suit it well for long-term aging.
My B-I-L is a winemaker and he says there’s three types of wine:
[ol]
[li]The best, only 2-4% of all wine produced, which should be aged for several years before drinking[/li][li]The majority, 80% of all wine produced, which is made to be drunk as soon as you bring it home from the shop[/li][li]The plonk, meant to be opened on the way home from the shop.[/li][/ol]