Day 9: 2013 Jadot Beaujolais Villages

I’m afraid I’m starting to make my younger friends a little nervous.

I keep asking them about wine. And which ones they drink. And why they like those wines. And who they’re with when they’re drinking them. And what those people are drinking too.

Which, obviously, leads to a conversation about dating. And sex. And Bumble. And Hinge. And Tinder.

(Which, naturally, led me to wonder why these apps weren’t around when I was dating… I mean, Tinder? Really??)

Anyway.

My friend N., a young and very eligible bachelor who had a glass of Argentinian Malbec in front of him at dinner the other night, said he loves to drink wine as long as it’s reasonably priced. “I have standards,” he said. “It can’t be cheap, but it can’t cost more than twenty dollars. And there has to be a cork. I want there to be a moment,” he said, gesturing for emphasis.

Fair enough. The moment for him was more important than what exactly he was drinking.

The next day I sat down for coffee with a new friend who, like N., is very smart and very much loves wine and drinks it (often) with her friends. The moment of pulling a cork didn’t seem to matter to her quite as much but I asked her, too, which wines she drinks with her friends and why they like those wines.

O. smiled and happily launched in.

Here’s what I learned about the wines that O. and her crowd are drinking:

• Tastes evolve as you get older, even if “older” is still quite young. By their mid- to late-twenties, they’ve grown out of Yellowtail and the two- and three-dollar options at Trader Joe’s. “Yeah,” O. said. “That was for college.” Trader Joe’s is still very much a top location to shop for wine these days, just at a higher price point.
• Cost matters too, and “medium” price points are best. After all, you might give the wine as a gift some day and no one wants to be seen as cheap. “Because that would be embarrassing,” O. said. But no one wants to be seen as spending too much on a wine, either. “Because that’s just crazy.”
• When they gather together, there’s always wine being poured but the conversation is never about the wine per se. “We’re not all that into it,” O. said, even though they’ve clearly thought enough about it to get the right wine on the table — one that’s at the right price point and isn’t “controversial,” that is.

By “not controversial,” what O. and her friends mean is that it’s a wine that everyone likes. It’s a wine that’s “not particularly robust or dry,” O. said, “just nicely in the middle.”

In other words, they actually want a wine that’s fairly nondescript, so that it “keeps the peace” at a party and anyone who drinks it is happy (or at least non-committal) about what’s in their glass. That way, they can move on to talking about other things that matter more.

One of those fairly nondescript wines is the 2013 Jadot Beaujolais Villages. “We aren’t buying it because it’s necessarily the best wine,” O. said. “But when we’re buying a red, it’s easy to buy.”

It’s also very easy to drink and, yes, “not controversial.” It isn’t going to rock the boat too far in either direction and that’s most of the goal. It’s a crowd-pleaser. It satisfies N., as it costs less than $20 and has a cork. It satisfies O. too, as it isn’t too robust or too dry or too expensive or too cheap. It has flavor and aroma and taste at the appropriate levels of assertiveness, but it doesn’t stick its neck out.

Sometimes, for whole phases of your life, in fact, that’s exactly and only what you want from the drink in your glass.

Quick Background Note: The Blue Collar Wine Guide is a 30-day, 30-wine experiment that looks at some of the world’s most popular, consumer-friendly wines. The idea is to take off my wine-writer shoes and stand instead in the shoes of Jane-and-Joe-in-front-of-a-wall-of-wine. Thank you for reading today’s post!