Wine of the Week: Maison Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages

Dr. Wino’s Take:

Founded in 1859 and covering over 380 acres, the Maison Louis Jadot French wine producer has had plenty of time and space to perfect their well-known Beaujolais wines.  The featured wine for the fourth week of the spring semester is the Maison Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages. This wine, while maintaining a reasonably high alcohol content is surprisingly mild and particularly agreeable as a sipping red.
The Beaujolais Villages area is located South of Beaujolais in a region where the terroir is characterized primarily by the abundance of granite. Contributing to the flavor profile are the viticulture practices of Maison Louis Jadot. Amazing for its size, the Maison Louis Jadot wines are now produced without the use of commercially produced fertilizers or herbicides.
Presenting a vibrant purple color, this wine’s friendly appearance mimics its flavor profile. The fruity nose is framed with an earthy tone. The fruit forward taste is combined with peppery notes and a round flavor created with the slightest taste of moss. The finish leaves something to be desired, but the mild flavor of this 100 percent Gamay wine just asks for you to pour a second glass. Why not buy two bottles?  You can find this Beaujolais at Hannafords for eleven dollars American.

Lady Lush’s Take:

Hello. Lady Lush here. As a counterpoint to Dr. Winos’s very informative and intelligent review of wines, I intend to provide a less conventional assessment of the wines. Sometimes this course of action will involve flavor profiles containing references to inanimate objects and fictional characters. Comparisons to Franzia might happen.
On to the alcohol. This wine is kind of boring. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Because it doesn’t have the strongest flavors, it is also a quite inoffensive wine. In other words, if you tend to blanch at wines that promise “layers of sweet cherry, fresh raspberries, cola and earthy mushrooms,” like a California Pinot Noir wine served at American Flatbread, presumptuously named “Irony,” don’t be afraid. There are no hints of fungus or dirt or formaldehyde or freshly cut grass in this wine. It does not taste like a brisk autumn night, or an empty studio apartment. If a person with no imagination whatsoever, like a science major, was asked to create a flavor profile of “red wine” in their head, and you could somehow pour this thought into a bottle, Dumbledore-style, it would taste like this wine.
Although most of Maison Louis Jadot’s description of the wine, found on their website, made me want to call National Enquirer and give them a tip that douchepocalypse is imminent, I was struck by one sentence: “This wine is supposed to be drunk young.” I am aware that this sentence is supposed to convey that you should drink this wine relatively close to the time you buy it, but I choose to interpret it as, “young people with relatively unsophisticated wine palates will enjoy this wine.” So, put down your Carlo Rossi. That crap tastes like Hawaiian Punch. This wine is as easy to drink, but its pretentious label and French pedigree will have you looking pretty classy this weekend.