‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over to Burgundy in their Aston Martins and Jaguars, fill up with Beaujolais and roar back home.

The idea for a race across France was cooked up by Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann in 1970. It really took off in 1974 when the Sunday Times offered a prize to the first person to bring a case of wine back to the newspaper’s offices following its release at midnight on the third Thursday in November.

The first winner was John Patterson, who flew it back in a plane and arrived in London at 2.30 a.m., much to the consternation of all the proto-Clarksons, I imagine. In an amusing footnote, Patterson was the entrepreneur behind Dateline, the first computer dating service. Eventually, the French authorities got tired of speeding Englishmen and moved the release venue to Calais, which rather took the fun out of the event. Beaujolais is, mainly, a light red wine from the south of Burgundy made from the gamay grape. Producers in the region began promoting the release of the ‘nouveau’ wines in 1951.

The quality was usually nothing to write home about. Auberon Waugh described such wines as ‘just an excuse for a lot of repressed businessmen to get drunk on a Monday morning’. The grapes were harvested in September and in order to make sure they were ready by November they might be fermented at high temperature with special fast-acting yeasts. Furthermore, while having a wine that’s only just finished fermenting isn’t a problem if you’re serving it by the jug in a bar in Lyons, it needs heavy filtration to make it stable enough to bottle – meaning less flavour. By the time I entered the wine trade in the late 1990s demand had dropped drastically. We put up a sign saying ‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ but the bottles sat there in the shop gathering dust. People wanted dark heavy reds like Australian shiraz or Argentine malbec.

But Beaujolais fever has lingered on in some places like, oddly, Swansea where the whole town turns out for its arrival. It’s thought that this peculiar popularity dates back to former Wales rugby international Clem Thomas, who had a house in the region and used to bring cases of the stuff back to the bar he owned in Swansea.

There’s been a modest resurgence in recent years as Beaujolais has become fashionable with hipsters who refer to it as ‘Bojo’, or did until the word became a common diminutive for a former editor of this magazine. The truth is Beaujolais nouveau done right, like the wine I had last year from a producer called Cécile Dardanelli, is impossible not to enjoy as long as you leave your prejudices at the door. Buy a bottle on the third Thursday of November and see for yourself. Le Beaujolais nouveau est de retour!