Update on the Brun Beaujolais Ban....
Here's what's going on....
The INAO regulations in Beaujolais are that you have to give five bottle samples for each batch of wine you want to be judged for the AOC. Each batch is limited to 300 hectolitres. So, if you want to get the AOC for 900 hectolitres, for example, you have to give at least 15 bottles and mark each one as coming from a different lot. But....if you have one 900 hectolitres batch of wine which is all the same, you still have to make believe that there are three different lots of 300 hectolitres because the INAO regulations mandate AOC status can only be given to a batch that is 300 hectolitres or less.
So, Jean-Paul Brun divided up the same wine into multiple samples. Nameless people at the INAO, who are all producers of Beaujolais, then taste the wine and decide if the wine is as good as Duboeuf or any of the other junk that gets the appellation.
Brun has had problems over the years. After you are rejected, you are allowed to appeal three times. Often, he has to go the third appeal because his peers find the wine flawed because it doesn't taste like the wines 98% of the AOC are making.
This year, his first batch was approved and we have been proudly buying and selling that wine. But subsequent batches were refused through all three appeals. So, the same wine was approved and refused and Jean-Paul Brun has lost the Beaujolais AOC for over 5,000 cases.
The refusal on the third appeal of the rejected wine reads:
After the controls done according to the rules of the rural code concerning the analytic and organoleptic tests of wines of Appellation Contrôlée, and the laws of 8/20/2004 governing sparkling wines, and of 11/19/2004 governing other wines, this is the decision taken on the above-mentioned wine:
Rubber
Mushrooms
Volatile Acidity
None of these flaws were found with the first batch, which is now available in wine stores around America, even though it blood brother suffer from rubber, mushrooms and volatile acidity.
Sounds Orwellian? Impossible to understand? Don't blame me....
And these geniuses wonder why they are losing marketing share? Someone makes great Beaujolais and is arbitrarily penalized, someone who makes industrial plonk is rewarded!
return to: Joe Dressner The Wine Importer
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"...d Manuel Camblor’s La Otra Botella (ok, I could only sort of read that one...). But I expect that there are at least a few readers here that might not regularly peruse those great sites. In any event, intrepid importer and occasional blogger oedressner/?2423"Joe Dressner recently broke the news that Jean-Paul Brun’s entire 2007 production of Beaujolais “Cuvée L’Ancien” has been denied AOC status by France’s INAO tasting authorities. In other words, this wi..."