There is a popular belief that practising a skill day-in-day-out will turn you into an expert. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, says that 10,000 hours of grind is what it takes to become a John Lennon or a Bill Gates. 

Well I’m here to call merde de taureau on this.

I have put in easily over 10,000 hours of wine drinking and I can say with some confidence that I’m an idiot on the subject. 

Ten thousand actual hours? I’m afraid so, madame.

Let’s do the maths. I’m counting 15 hours of wine drinking per week (it’s been less for quite a few years but I really got stuck in in my twenties and early thirties) for let’s say 25 years. That’s 780 hours a year x 25 years = 19,500 hours! 

Nearly double Gladwell’s 10,000 hours and yet I remain resolutely dunce-like where wine is concerned. 

I mean, it’s true that I’ve picked up something in that time and here it is:

Red = meat

White = chicken/fish

Rosé = summer!

About as complex as my understanding of traffic lights. Leonardo de VIN-ci (cough) I’m not.

If you were to ask me what my favourite wine was I’d say it’s the white one from Picard. I don’t know what grape it’s made from or what region produces it but I do know that it tastes great and – oh so importantly – they sell it chilled in the fridge so I can drink it as soon as I get home. No 30-minute wait for this thirsty lady.

Clearly marinating in wine for 25 years is not enough. Some education is required.

To this end, I recently joined a wine subscription club. Bung them €25 a month and they’ll send you a couple of bottles plus tasting notes to show you what flavours you should be noticing but are not. It’s a recent adoption and so far not a wild success; the first red from South Africa was a bit too Ribena-ish for me and the second, a French white, was “not as nice as the Picard one”.  

With this same spirit of adventure, I realised that November is an important month in the French wine calendar, and provides me with an opportunity to discover another, very famous, wine: beaujolais nouveau.

Beaujolais nouveau is unlike other wines in that it is picked, pressed, fermented then sold when it is very, very young – only 6 to 8 weeks after harvest. A Michael Jackson of a wine, if you will. 

Its flavour is described as fruity with Wikipedia claiming that it tastes like banana (ooh!) and grape (oh). Though red, it should be drunk chilled – to numb the tongue? – and young as its character “doesn’t improve with age”. Like I said, a Michael Jackson of a wine.

There is then a national race for the first bottles to reach Paris on the third Thursday in November where its arrival is celebrated in shops, bars and restaurants, many of which scatter straw on their floors to soak up spillages.

It’s the straw and only the straw that alerts me that it’s bojo time in Paris because it’s not a fête that my French partner and I have ever taken part in. 

I have never tasted beaujolais nouveau.

“Why don’t we drink beaujolais nouveau every year in November?” I ask my beloved, like a child whose atheist parents refuse to celebrate Christmas on principle.

“I tried it once and it was horrible,” is his stark reply.

This didn’t put me off. As someone whose formative wine drinking consisted of bottles of bulgarian red bought from an off licence in Glasgow where a metal grill protected the alcohol and staff from the customers (our wine may be rough but our customers are rougher) I like to think that I’m made of stern stuff, able to handle a mauvais goût with the best of them.

I mean, how horrible can it be?

I’ll soon find out. Today is beaujolais nouveau day. I plan on carrying out several testing over the weekend and will report back my findings next week.

Feel free to join in with your own quaffing and let us know in the comments how you got on. Until then, santé and tchin!

Photo by Danilo Alvesd on Unsplash