Bojo redux: The best 2005 nouveaux

I gave the first taste of this year’s Beaujolais nouveaux a second go Friday at Vintage Wine Cellars, Vintage always has the biggest pouring – six nouveaux and 70some folks, the kind of fun that should salute the primeur.

Wine was more like old times too. Mommesin and Bouchard were still unexciting, but the other four came closer to winning the cherry: right, bright and light, That’s all I ask of BN and trusted importers delivered – Laboure Roi, Drouhin, Kermit Lynch and the king, HRH Georges DuBoeuf.

Burgundy’s Laboure Roi fetched sweet cherries and a bit of pepper mild and easy but Drouhin did it better with a grapey taste, a full round mouthfeel in bright shiny purple.

Just as fine was Dupeuble (pronounced Da pubb, Vintage advised on the tasting sheet, an innovation worth copying. This is less common and more expensive: $13.99, compared to $10.99 for the rest.. It comes from the better villages and as selected by Lynch, a brilliant importer from Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Again, bright colors, cherries and pepper easy to drink.

At Vintage tasters vote with their wallets, and most left with a bottle or three of Dupeuble and Drouhin under their arms.

Good call, but I put Duboeuf in my top three too. No one polishes gamay like the master. His had crisper raspberries in the nose and on the palate, fewer cherries and the smoothest.,richest texture.

Buy any of the three and you’ll get a solid taste of the fun and the fuss. (On the labels, DuBoeof put his trademark flowers in gold leaf Picasso sketches, Drouhn pted for an off-kilter checkerboard, LaBoure Roi for happy sketches. The Dupeuble had plain script and put all its color in the bottle).

Vintage also threw in a 2003 Macon, the white Burgundy for real people, crisp and full of pear and a little spice, and a non-nouveaux Beaujolais Villages from 2004.That’s real Beaujolais,only a year old it’s grown up big, ripe and full – and cheaper than nouveaux.
On to next year – and back to 2004, 2003, and 2002.