Le Beaujolais Nouveau est périmé
Ambassador of the Beaujolais, this famous wine will be served in your glasses on the 3rd Thursday of November. Prepare yourself now !
This wine of a clear red colour, cherry or redcurrant, reveals sometimes ruby reflections. Fresh and strongly aromatic, it is oriented on small red fruits (currant, raspberry or blackcurrant).
After my recent, snarly, coffee-driven sputterings on Fermentation complaining about how, to generalize, French wine does not market itself effectively, comes fresh fuel on the embers of me wrath.
As the leaves begin to twinkle down from the trees each year, so do e-mails and the like begin to arrive, ecstatically announcing the imminent arrival of the Beajolais Nouveau. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that no-one in Ireland gets excited about this. If they ever did, it was twenty-five years ago and only as a seasonal change from the Blue and the Black.
From the Bubble Brothers point of view I am fairly certain that, irrespective of its quality, I wouldn't be able to give the stuff away. The Beauj. Nouv. campaign cannot be heard: it isn't communicating. I don't even think you could make much headway with an ironic-retro launch, the last resort of dead-horse-floggery.
At the very least, you would expect the people whose job it is to advertise French wine overseas to push the boat out and track down one of those thin-on-the-ground, wildly exotic native English speakers to cast an eye over what they've written.
But no, they get, for example, the mayor's self-promoting nephew, who has actually been to Paris (oh!) and who has a degree (ah!), to inflate and transmogrify some piece of already-purple French into what would appear (to the non-native speaker, perhaps the poor deluded winemaker him- or herself) to be English so loftily and yet cunningly worded that the foolish rosbifs (et al.) cannot fail to start falling over themselves to buy the stuff.
I wish they'd cop themselves on. The man on the Clapham omnibus doesn't need too much persuading to have a glance at something new, but he needs a little, because he's busy. How do you think he'll respond to hand-me-down adverts that weren't even cutting it in the original?
Gissa job!
Technorati tags: myopia, marketing, Beaujolais+nouveau, localization
