Japan overtook the United States as Beaujolais' top export market in 2004, but a disastrous sales campaign for Beaujolais Nouveau last year raised serious doubts as to whether Asia can save the Beaujolais from the hole that they've dug themselves into.
By the mid-1990s, it was hard to travel during the autumn anywhere in the Western world without being inundated with gushingly promotional stories in the media on the "race" to drink the first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, which since 1985 has been released at one minute after midnight on the third Thursday in November.
Yet by 2002, the supply-demand imbalance in Beaujolais had become so bad that the EU was forced to buy back more than 10 million liters of unsold wine, which ended up being converted into everything from wine vinegar to industrial ethanol.