Everything else in greater Burgundy is celebrated for age — crus, cellars, vintage charts, bottles you’re told to sit on for a decade. Beaujolais wine day celebrates the exact opposite: a red barely weeks old, raced out of the cellar rather than kept in one, with its own fixed date in the calendar. It’s the only wine in the region with a birthday — and most people raising a glass to it have no idea they’re drinking something that used to embarrass the whole region. Beaujolais is a red wine area just south of Burgundy’s Mâconnais, made almost entirely from Gamay, and grouped administratively with “greater Burgundy” even though its soils, climate and grape are its own thing. By the end of this, you’ll know what’s actually being celebrated, when the specific Nouveau release lands, and which Beaujolais is worth buying beyond the party bottle.
Why is Beaujolais Day celebrated?
It’s celebrated because a clever bit of 1970s marketing turned a farmhouse habit into a global event. Winemakers in the region had, since the 19th century, raced their newest wine to Lyon while it was still finishing fermentation in cask — a young, direct link to village life back home. That race became a release-day tradition — a wine sold by the clock while its northern neighbours sold by the cellar — and by the second half of the 20th century it had grown into a full-blown wine festival with its own following in France, the UK and, especially, Japan.
The deeper story goes back further than any marketing plan, mind. Beaujolais sits on an old Roman trade route up the Rhône and Saône valleys, and Benedictine monks were tending vines here from the early medieval period onward. The region takes its name from Beaujeu, a hill town founded in the 10th century and ruled by its own dukes before passing to the Bourbonnais. For most of the medieval period it was simply Burgundy’s southern neighbour — until Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, banned Gamay from Burgundy proper in the 14th century and pushed the grape south for good. I used to think that edict was just historical trivia. It’s actually the reason Beaujolais exists as its own place at all.
Is today Beaujolais Nouveau Day?
Beaujolais Nouveau Day is a fixed date, not a floating one: the third Thursday of November, every year, by an exception written into French AOC law that lets these wines skip the usual ageing wait. So “today” depends entirely on which November Thursday you’re reading this on — worth checking against that rule rather than guessing. The wider search for “Beaujolais wine day” covers more ground than this one release date; it takes in the whole cluster of celebrations around the region, Nouveau included.
Nouveau once made up a striking share of everything the region produced, back when the birthday craze was at its peak. These days it’s a much smaller slice of total production, with the rest going into proper Beaujolais, Villages, and the ten crus. The wines are made by carbonic or semi-carbonic maceration (whole bunches ferment inside their own skins before crushing), which is what gives Nouveau its distinctive bubblegum-and-kirsch lift rather than the darker fruit of a standard red.
Is Beaujolais Day a Welsh thing?
Not as far as I’ve ever found in the trade record — nothing ties this day specifically to Wales. It’s an easy mix-up to make; there are a fair few regional food-and-drink dates knocking about the UK calendar every autumn, and the Nouveau custom’s own history is French through and through, arriving here via the same Soho-and-City parties that, fairly or not, gave the wine a reputation problem for a good couple of decades. If you’ve landed on this question hunting for a Welsh wine custom, I’d steer you elsewhere — but stick around, because the actual story here is worth your time.
Choosing your Beaujolais: villages, crus, and what’s worth the extra pound
This is where most people stop too early — at the entry-level bottle — and miss what the region can really do. There are three tiers, and they behave differently in the glass.
| Level | Character | Price shape |
|---|---|---|
| Beaujolais AOC | Purple, gulpable, drink young, served cellar-cool | Inexpensive |
| Beaujolais-Villages AOC | Riper, more concentrated, red cherry and kirsch | Inexpensive to mid-priced |
| The 10 Crus (Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Régnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas, Saint-Amour) | Structured, some built to age a decade or more | Mid-priced, and climbing |
Brouilly, the largest and most southerly cru, makes the lightest, most perfumed style of the ten — a fair first step in. From there, Fleurie — the region’s most floral cru — tends to win over anyone still lukewarm on the whole area. Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas and Juliénas are the four the trade watches most closely, increasingly spoken of in the same breath as red Burgundy on quality — this is where the region stops selling its birthday and starts earning a cellar of its own. If you already like a lighter, juicier red style, it’s worth also having a look at Garnacha: the comeback grape — a different region telling a similar story of a grape climbing back up the ladder.
Here’s a fact that rarely gets an airing: right next door, the Coteaux du Lyonnais makes near-identical Gamay reds, drunk mostly by the people of Lyon and only granted its own appellation status fairly recently. Genuinely one of Burgundy’s best-kept secrets, that one — even most of the trade forgets it exists.
What to eat on Beaujolais Nouveau Day?
Keep it plain and a little rustic. The wine’s light body, high acidity and gulpable style want food that doesn’t fight it: roast chicken, charcuterie boards, mushrooms on toast, a decent wedge of Brie. Serve it properly cool — cellar temperature, not fridge-cold — and it comes alive in a way room-temperature reds never quite manage.
This is, at heart, a Tuesday wine dressed up as an event. If your usual habit is one glass with something simple in front of the telly, our piece on The Tuesday-night bottle: choosing wine for TV and takeaway covers exactly that kind of pairing logic — this style fits it better than most reds twice its price.
What it costs, and why the crus are creeping up
Basic Beaujolais and Villages stay genuinely cheap, and that’s by design — high yields, quick turnaround, drink-now style. The crus are a different animal. As red Burgundy’s prices have climbed, buyers looking for something in a similar shape but a friendlier price have turned to cru Beaujolais instead, and that demand has pushed prices up in kind. It’s still one of the fairer trades in French wine, pound for pound — but it won’t stay that quiet forever.
Ever wonder why two barrels made on neighbouring rows of vines can end up priced worlds apart once bottled? Burgundy runs on a classification system that rewards specific patches of soil over their neighbours, sometimes by a wide margin, and unpacking that logic properly takes more than a passing mention. Burgundy, decoded: villages, crus and why it costs what it costs is where we lay out the whole picture.
Questions customers ask us
Is Beaujolais the same as Burgundy? Administratively yes, in practice no. It’s grouped with greater Burgundy for trade purposes, but the soils, climate and near-total reliance on Gamay make it its own place in every way that matters in the glass.
Does any Beaujolais go white? A small amount, yes — Chardonnay mostly, with a little Aligoté (being phased out) and Melon. It’s a tiny fraction of total production, but worth asking your merchant about if you’re curious.
Can Beaujolais actually age? The basic and Villages levels are built for early drinking, no argument there. But the ageworthy crus — Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas among them — can genuinely improve for a decade or more, which surprises people every time I mention it.
The merchant’s last word
I sold Beaujolais wrong for years — always as the party bottle, never the proper wine underneath it. It took me a while to learn the better question wasn’t “fancy a Nouveau?” but “have you tried a cru yet?” That’s the one worth your money, this time of year or any other. Come and browse the burgundy cellar and I’ll point you to one.
