georges duboeuf

Recently, Dr. Vino had an interesting post on avoiding the Beaujolais Nouveau hype in favor of drinking local wine so as to avoid the carbon footprint of the French wine which is quickly bottled and then zipped off around the world on planes and trucks. French law rules that this popular red wine made from the Gamay grape be released the third Thursday in November at one minute past midnight.

While it's hard to argue with Dr. Vino's green logic there is something so pleasingly frothy about the Beaujolais Nouveau festivities. Georges Duboeuf won't win any prizes for being either subtle or carbon neutral this year, especially since the 2008 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau is being celebrated with a motorcycle parade through New York City. On Thursday, November 20, "motorcycle chef-heads" Marc Murphy, David Bouley, Johnny Iuzzini, Francois Payard, Kevin Garcia, R.J. Cooper and other top chefs and sommeliers will ride and deliver the first case of 2008 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau to an uncorking ceremony with Beaujolais bigwig Franck Duboeuf at Secession restaurant in the morning. Later in the day, from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Franck Duboeuf will appear at Sherry –Lehmann (505 Park Avenue) to offer a complementary tasting of Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau and in the evening from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. City Harvest's Generation Harvest and Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau Bash will take place at the Samsung Experience at Time Warner Center. Ticket to that event are $85 per person and benefit City Harvest. There are also events planned in Miami and in Las Vegas where a helicopter delivers a case of 2008 Beaujolais Nouveau to Las Vegas' Paris hotel and the hotel's s Eiffel Tower facsimile is lit in Beaujolais Red.

(Pictured above is Frank Duboeuf in a scene from the 2005 celebration.)

We first found out  last year that  Georges Duboeuf, Mr, Beaujolais Nouveau, was being investigated for wine fraud. There was apparently something to the claims, he has been fined €30,000 for fraud because some of the wine produced by his estate was blended with a variety of grapes rather than a single source. A series of barrels had been mixed with inferior grapes in attempts to conceal a bad harvest in 2004. Under France's AOC system blending is forbidden in order to maintain the terroir of a particular wine. Duboeuf has insisted that the blending was a mistake and not deliberately done. None of the wine was sold and the production manager at the winery,  Sylvain Dory,  resigned. For his part in the wine, Dory was given a three-month suspended sentence and fined €3000.