The third Thursday in November is Beaujolais Nouveau when bottles are of the young wine are released. There was an invented tradition for people to be the first to get bottles of the wine back to the UK together with a lot of publicity.
Those times have largely gone but the invented tradition is now being reinvented. The Times (20th November) reports. Thanks to climate change and warmer summers wine makers in Bordeaux are struggling but Beaujolais which is produced further north is less impacted. Industrial yeasts that gave Beaujolais a banana taste have largely been ditched by a new generation of wine producers. Far from being drunk young the wine can now be laid down or cellared, with the prospect of a Beaujolais Vintage.
A marketing opportunity certainly but not one for November 20th
Four prominent Irish journalists were killed in a plane crash in 1984 bringing bottles of Beaujolais Noveau in a ‘wine race’ back to Dublin (at a time when Ireland was suffering one of its many economic downturns that led, yet again, to young Irish people emigrating across the globe). As an unsophisticated Dublin teenager, from a very modest background, I was led to believe from the Dublin newspaper columns, both before and after the plane crash, that this ‘wine race’ was an important cultural ritual of the middle classes. Only later did I realise the sheer stupidity of what had happened and how utterly meaningless this race had been.https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/1114/659318-beaujolais-air-crash-1984/