The annual Beaujolais contest, the showcase for more than 1,000 French winegrowers, has been cancelled after producers of the region’s most prestigious wines decided to break away from the organisation which also promotes the mass-market Beaujolais Nouveau.
“It’s the first time in the history of Beaujolais that anything like this has happened,” said Denis Chilliet, the secretary-general of the Union Viticole du Beaujolais (UVB) which has represented all the Beaujolais winegrowers for the past 60 years.
He said that following Tuesday’s decision to split by the producers of the 10 Beaujolais cru wines, he ordered the cancellation of the Concours des Grands Vins du Beaujolais in case tempers boiled over at the end of the wine-tasting and awarding of medals. The contest had been scheduled for 9 January.
The row risks being portrayed as a kind of class warfare, pitting the best wines grown on the northern slopes of the Beaujolais region in Burgundy against the southern vineyards where the cheaper Beaujolais Villages and Beaujolais Nouveau are produced.
“Class warfare? More like a war caused by spoiled children,” said Chilliet.
The Beaujolais cru winemakers, who produce such brands as Fleurie and Brouilly, have accused the UVB of “dragging down” the best wines and failing to promote them sufficiently, which Chilliet denies. The decision by Audrey Charton representing the Beaujolais crus, took the UVB by surprise.
“We worked side by side for months, with no animosity, and then this came like a bolt from the blue,” Chilliet told the Guardian. “Apparently they think that if they do everything themselves they’d be better off.”
Charton was not available for comment on Thursday. A family member said that she was “trying to cool things down”.
The UVB and the breakaway group have agreed a three-month truce which will give them time to see how to proceed and to examine the financial implications. The Beaujolais crus intend to set up a new group, saying that the UVB is outdated with “goals, concerns, expectations and organisations which are increasingly different among the two families”.
Some winegrowers suspect that the Beaujolais crus may eventually hook up with the Burgundy wine trade. But Chilliet said: “Isn’t it better to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than a small one at the bottom of a big pond?”
He said he hopes for a solution with the breakaway winegrowers in the coming weeks, “but after all that’s happened, it will be difficult to pull back from the brink”.
