‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over to Burgundy in their Aston Martins and Jaguars, fill up with Beaujolais and roar back home.
The idea for a race across France was cooked up by Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann in 1970. It really took off in 1974 when the Sunday Times offered a prize to the first person to bring a case of wine back to the newspaper’s offices following its release at midnight on the third Thursday in November.
The first winner was John Patterson, who flew it back in a plane and arrived in London at 2.30 a.m., much to the consternation of all the proto-Clarksons, I imagine. In an amusing footnote, Patterson was the entrepreneur behind Dateline, the first computer dating service. Eventually, the French authorities got tired of speeding Englishmen and moved the release venue to Calais, which rather took the fun out of the event. Beaujolais is, mainly, a light red wine from the south of Burgundy made from the gamay grape. Producers in the region began promoting the release of the ‘nouveau’ wines in 1951.
The quality was usually nothing to write home about. Auberon Waugh described such wines as ‘just an excuse for a lot of repressed businessmen to get drunk on a Monday morning’.
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