Celebrating Beaujolais Nouveau Day!

Beaujolais Nouveau Day is around the corner, on November 21, 2013. That's the day that this year's Beaujolais Nouveau wines are released and festivals and events take place across Europe and in U.S. cities from Boston to Seattle.

The French are protective about their wine. In fact, it's written into French law that each year's Beaujolais Nouveau cannot be released until exactly 12:01 am on the third Thursday of November!

The event is marked in France by fireworks and celebrations. For decades, vintners have raced to be the first to get their Beaujolais Nouveau wines on the tables of restaurants in Paris. Later, the race extended across the channel to London. Now it seems like it's one big world-wide sprint to get the bottles out to all corners, so wine revelers can cheer: "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!"

The timing is great for American Thanksgiving Day, as Beaujolais Nouveau is said to pair well with turkey. Hats off to the French for their canny marketing techniques! A century ago, the wine, made of hand-picked Gamay grapes, was just a humble table wine made by Beaujolais locals for their own enjoyment, to celebrate the end of the harvest. Now it's an international star. The young wine is generally best enjoyed by the May of the following year.

Whether you like Beaujolais Nouveau or prefer a more mature wine, we think any excuse for a celebration is good enough. So you can always get in the spirit by raising a glass of your favorite Napa Valley red in honor of Beaujolais Nouveau Day!

While we're talking about wine, I had to share a photo of this new wine glass bar stool that is in our gallery, because the cut-out design on the back is so charming and clever. It's perfect for a wine celebration or for a wine-lover's home! Crafted by Woodbridge Furniture Company, the solid wood bar stool has a hand-rubbed and waxed distressed finish, so it looks like it could have come from an old Parisian bistro or wine bar. (We have this design in a counter-height stool too.)

Although I appreciate wine, I doubt that Beaujolais Nouveau will be on our Thanksgiving table. Greg and I will be enjoying Uncle Dick's Famous Bloody Mary recipe, as you can see in my earlier post!

But I know that many of our customers are real wine connoisseurs. I would love to have a large enough wine collection to take advantage of this incredible new Ambella Home Enoteca bar cabinet. (We recently added the Ambella Home Collection line of furniture to our gallery, as the quality, design, and craftsmanship meet our high standards!) The 8-foot-tall bar features tons of wine cradles, storage cabinets, and racks to hang stemware.

I think this new, reproduction French server/sideboard with a built-in wine rack is more my size! With the whitewash finish on the wood and a lovely limestone tile top, the server looks as if it would be quite at home in a French farmhouse in wine country.

All this talk of wine has made me thirsty! A votre santé! If you celebrate Beaujolais Nouveau Day, we'd love to hear how you do it. Tell us in the comments box below.