Last Updated on January 13, 2026 by Allison Coe
This Thursday, being the third Thursday in November, is the official release date and festivities for this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau: it’s the first taste of this year’s grape harvest, before the rest of the 2025 vintage is put away to be aged.
This inexpensive too-young red wine is nothing to crow about: it is brash and fruity, and served chilled to mask its lack of age… so why is its release celebrated around the world? Basically because of a 1951 French law meant to regulate the minimum fermentation time and tamp down public drunkenness… which completely backfired and ended up increasing the excitement for this not-great new wine, ultimately transforming it into a world-wide phenomenon.
I was surprised to learn that Japan is the largest importer of Beaujolais Nouveau, followed by Germany, and then America, where Georges Duboeuf imports over 2 million colorfully labeled bottles each year just in time for Thanksgiving. (…Until the Trump Tariffs that is… good luck finding cheap Beaujolais Nouveau in the US this year!)
Having managed to get my hands on an advance bottle with the idea of doing an early review, I discovered something even more interesting: it turns out that drinking or selling this rather frivolous wine before the third Thursday in November is still illegal, with the threat of a 150€ fine! …So I can tell you that it’s light and fruity… and the threat of legal prosecution definitely gives the wine a bit more heft!
It becomes legal to sell/drink after the stroke of midnight Wednesday, and by Thursday morning every wine shop in France will be offering samples, and by nighttime most bars will be toasting and celebrating…
Would you like a little illegal cheese to go with your illegal wine? According to my local cheese shop, at one point the very possession of Reblochon cheese was proof of moral turpitude and was cause for arrest.
In medieval France, poor dairy farmers paid rich landowners grazing fees based on the milk yield. The landowners charged abusively high fees, so to recoup, some farmers would not do a complete milking; then once all the milk had been accounted for and tallied, they would then secretly milk the cows again. Supplemental milking produces a liquid that is almost all fat, so the resulting cheese (called Reblochon which literally means “re-milking”) was easily identifiable and had to be hidden! Possession of Reblochon cheese was proof of stealing from your landlord and could land you in jail, and it obviously couldn’t be sold, so it became a secret staple of the impoverished farmer’s family diet, which was mostly potatoes anyway.
Reblochon is no longer illegal in France, but it is illegal in the USA (!) due to not being pasteurized. It is most famously used for Tartiflette, a hearty peasant dish baked with sliced potatoes, onions and bacon… Try it in the Old Town at Le Cave du Fromager or at any of the French outdoor Christmas Markets. Or better yet make this easy, economical, and very filling gratin at home with this recipe by David Lebovich, which includes legal cheese substitutions if you are in the US…!
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