letour - the empty bottle of Charles Shaw Gamay-Beaujolais Nouveau sits empty on my table:

To me it seemed very similar to Charles Shaw Shiraz wine - very drinkable and pleasant, for the $2.99 price.

But it's not from France but from California, as all Chas Shaw wines are i believe (for those not familiar with Trader Joe's in US - this is a discount gourmet/health food chain and especially touted for their inexpensive wines - Charles Shaw is the name of a wine only marketed thru Trader Joe - called 'two-buck Chuck' because of it's $1.99/bottle cost ($2.99 in some parts of the country like mine) - this wine was developed by Charles Shaw, who was the scion of a major California vintner (Peter Vella?) but got froze out or sold out and decided to create his own low-cost wines to compete in the California wine market - decent wines at low cost. I think he buys surplus grapes mainly but maintains a good quality control and can avoid advertising costs thru the Trader Joe contract and 'two-buck Chuck' hype. I read in the Wall Street Journal his Cabernet Sauvignon stacked up very well in blind taste tests with $10/btl California wines.)

Anyway this Charles Shaw 'Gamay Beaujolais' with the word Nouveua elsewhere on the bottle is made 75% from Valdiguie grapes it says - a varietal i've never heard of and wonder if they use it in Beaujolais in France?

Anyway i'm off soon to buy more before it disappears and gets to be Oldveau.

Well copped three more bottles and they were exactly like the others - the corks are extremely hard to get out of the bottle! And they're real cork.

At my local Franprix in Paris, I discovered that the cheapest Beaujolais Nouveau was the best. But in all 3 bottles, the corks disintegrated when I tried to pull them out. Very annoying. I had to rip them out bit by bit, creating a little flotsam and jetsam problem when the wine was finally poured. Interesting to note that on the cheapest wines, the savings are not necessarily made on the quality of the wine itself but on the quality of the corks and the bottles (very thin glass).

My wife brought home a $3.95 bottle of French Bordeaux from Whole Foods that was, while not complex, eminently drinkable.

Cheers!
letour

Yes corks disintegrating has to be one of life's most frustrating things - ready to sip but so far away. I regularly buy Mosel Qualitatswein at Trader Joe for $3.99/btl and Mosel Spatlese for $5.99 and both taste great and use plastic corks - i guess it would be hard for cheap BN French producers to use such corks but they'd be better than rotted ones.

The California Gamay Beaujolias Nouveau from Charles Shaw at Trader Joe's cork as i said was so tight in each bottle that it was a struggle to get it out - but it was a perfect cork.

Cheers to you both.