Glass half empty: Why Japan’s love affair with Beaujolais Nouveau has soured
- With so many good wines from around the world becoming increasingly available, the favourite party quaff may struggle to recapture its market share in Japan
- The once cheap and cheerful plonk is having to contend with soaring costs as fuel becomes significantly more expensive and transportation more complicated
The bubble may have burst for Beaujolais Nouveau in Japan, with a steep increase in the cost of delivering to the country that was once an important market making the fruity red more of a luxury than a cheap reason for a party.
Importers and consumers of wines say that with so many good wines becoming increasingly available from around the world, Beaujolais may struggle to recapture its market share in Japan.
After the success of an excellent marketing campaign in Europe in the 1960s that saw races to deliver the first bottles of the wine to restaurants and bars for the third Thursday every November, Japan started to import large quantities of Beaujolais Nouveau in the middle of the 1980s, the peak of the nation’s freewheeling “bubble economy.”
Imports peaked in 2004 at 1.04 million cases of wine, each containing 12 bottles, but even as sales began to decline, Japan still imported close to 5 million bottles as recently as 2019, accounting for about half of the entire output of the Beaujolais region of France, just north of Lyon. In 2020, that figure fell to 3.8 million bottles.
The world has changed dramatically in the last three years, however, and Beaujolais Nouveau is likely to be affected by those changes.