Today is the third Thursday of November, and you know what that means — or do you? In the wine world, this date marks the arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau, but with each passing year people care less and less about that banana-flavoured crap, despite the global hype created by the multi-million-dollar Nouveau marketing empire.

And thank God for that. Beaujolais Nouveau represents nothing more than consumerism at its peak, offering little more than a dollop of tutti-frutti flavours and a dose of alcohol underneath all the trendy packaging and bright colours.

Beaujolais Nouveau has been around since 1951. The wine is 100 per cent Gamay and made with carbonic maceration, a process in which the berry clusters are fermented whole. This emphasizes the fruit flavours without extracting very much tannin from the skins. The juice is also usually fermented with a particular strain of yeast (71B, to be precise), which has the curious side effect of making the wine smell and taste like bananas. This yeast strain is used so widely that many people take the banana aroma as a signature of authentic Beaujolais — Nouveau or otherwise. Other typical Nouveau flavours include pear drops, kirsch, and strawberry candy.

Beaujolais Nouveau’s global dominance was spearheaded by the region’s largest négociant, George Duboeuf. (A négociant is a wine producer who buys grapes or unfinished juice from small producers and then ages, bottles, and sells the wine under his own label.) Duboeuf has more than 400 suppliers and an annual production of four million bottles, with Beaujolais Nouveau accounting for over one-fifth of this production.

But the sheer size of the Beaujolais Nouveau empire has become its undoing. While it certainly generated a hell of a lot of quick cash for the négociants, it also seriously damaged Beaujolais’ reputation. Though the French know that the Beaujolais region produces plenty of non-Nouveau wine, far fewer outsiders are aware of this; many North Americans think Nouveau is representative of Beaujolais, or even that it’s the only wine from the region. In reality, Beaujolais has 10 premier growing areas, called “Crus,” that make fantastic wines. The wines are still fairly light and fruit-forward — that’s just Gamay’s nature — but they lack the bubblegum flavours and flimsy structure of Nouveau.

But with producers treating Beaujolais Nouveau like a cash cow, cramming as many vines as they can into their vineyards, there are literally rivers of unsold, shitty wine that must be destroyed; nearly 10 per cent of the year’s production goes down the toilet.

As we slide ever further into recession, it’s unlikely that this kind of thing will last much longer. Wine no longer resides in the realm of the elite, and with the oceans of wine information available in print and online, people are daily becoming more and more informed. I guarantee that once you have learned about and tasted the Cru Beaujolais, you won’t waste your time with Nouveau. And while Duboeuf can afford to dump money (and unsold wine) into the annual mania, luring ignorant wine-drinkers to banana-flavoured doom, smaller producers won’t be able to partake in this needlessly wasteful enterprise. Riding on the sound of six billion pursestrings tightening, Beaujolais producers will have to focus their attention on making good value wines. Sure, Nouveau only goes for around $20 a bottle, but someone on a limited budget is going to look for the best bang he or she can get, and a Cru Beaujolais for a few dollars less will be the undisputed winner.

If all the hype has got you feeling the consumerist urge (and you’ve still got cash to drop), ignore the Nouveau posters and go for a Cru Beaujolais. You can find one for less than $20, no problem, and they offer a true representation of the Gamay variety. They will be labelled under the following names: Saint-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Régnié, Brouilly, and Côte de Brouilly. And though Duboeuf’s wines are the most common even at this level, make a point of buying from another producer. That poor sucker buying Duboeuf’s Nouveau will more than make up for your boycott.