Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – Part Two

IT WAS MID-MARCH, EARLY DAYS for shelter-in-place. No tumbleweeds were blowing across College Avenue yet, but Elmwood was a ghost town.

Stuck at home in Napa and rather desperate for some French gamay that wasn’t the Duboeuf Beaujolais stocked on our (and every) local supermarket shelf, I drove down to this normally bustling pocket of Berkeley to pick up a wine called Traboules, a delicious and unusual bottle of gamay from the Rhône Valley’s Coteaux du Lyonnais that I tracked down last year.

The trip was shockingly quick: fifty-five minutes door-to-door from Napa. Only at 6:00 AM on a Sunday—or, I suppose, during a pandemic. The novel coronavirus had brought the novelty of zero Thursday morning traffic to the usual I-80 parking lot.

Granted, an excursion away from Napa Valley to find wine might sound like leaving Darjeeling to go tea shopping. But if you’re looking for good French wine, you head to Berkeley. And if something unique like Traboules is on your list, you make a beeline for Vintage Berkeley.

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Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – Part One

Drink is the feast of reason and the flow of soul. – Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace

 

RECENTLY, I GOT MYSELF into a predicament that, courtesy of their government, U.S. wine geeks narrowly avoided a couple of months ago: I ran out of gamay.

The paucity verged on the political. Had the White House made good in February on its late 2019 threat to increase tariffs from an already egregious 25% on French and other European wines to an industry-wrecking 100%, it would have been bye-bye Beaujolais. And Beaujolais-Villages. And Côtes-du-Rhône Villages and the like. Chablis, Champagne, Château Take-Your-Pick? Adieu to all of them—or at least au revoir for a good, long time.

As if there wasn’t enough government-driven panic going around.

So, when the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, issued his decision on February 14th not to raise the tariffs, it was a reprieve for my beloved gamay noir à jus blanc, as the wine grape of Beaujolais is properly known.

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