Ep. 2532 The Wines of Beaujolais with Natasha Hughes MW | Book Club with Richard Hough

This was very new freshly made wine that was bottled very shortly after harvest and after fermentation and shipped out to all kinds of distribution points. And Beaujolais Nouveau, the world fell in love with it. This was a time when we didn't have new world wines to fit that kind of fruit driven, easy drinking, affordable slot in the supermarkets, and that was largely filled by Beaujolais Nouveau. Hello, and welcome to book club with the Italian wine podcast. I'm your host, Richard Hoff, and I'm delighted that you're joining us as we get between the vines with some of the best wine writing out there. So sit back, pour yourself a glass, and enjoy the show with the Italian wine podcast. This month, our guest is Natasha Fuse, master of wine and author of The Wines of Beaujolais, published by the Academy du Vin Library on the 09/22/2025. Hi, Natasha. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for coming on. It's a real pleasure to have you on the show. Hi. Thank you for having me. I love an underdog story. I love a glass of Beaujolais. It's one of my favorite wine regions, so I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. You know, it's really interesting every time I talk to wine professionals about this book. Most people, sometimes on the quiet, say do you know what? I love Beaujolais. I you know, it's one of the wines that I drink most frequently at home and yet it still has this image of being this kind of cheap, very one dimensional wine. And I guess we'll talk about why that might be a bit later in this podcast. I mean, it it's true. It's almost like a guilty pleasure. In a similar way, I think, that Lambrusco, outside of Italy, certainly still has that reputation. Absolutely. Within Italy, Lambrusco is one of one of the the great Italian wines. Oh, I love it so. By tarnished by that reputation in the the mid nineteen eighties. Yep. Absolutely. And I think Beaujolais has has much to say. I seem to remember an only foods and horses episode where, Del Boy was drinking Beaujolais at a at a a dodgy wine bar. But that that's another story. Yep. So let's go back to the to your your beginnings, if you like, your origins and why. When when did your interest in wine begin? So I came from a family background where, you know, I grew up in London. My dad was a doctor, and like many kind of professional men of his generation, he drank wine. My both my parents were interested in food, but I didn't really get interested in wine in any kind of big way, until much later. I ran a catering company part time when I was at university. When some of my, fellow students were tending bar to make their pocket money. I was I was off there sort of catering dinner parties and and and party parties. And I then went to live in Australia, and and people are much more comfortable around wine in Australia, maybe because they're surrounded by it and it's not a thing for posh people as it was for people of my generation. But I came back to The UK in the mid nineties and began working as an editor copy editor initially on books and then on magazines. And I got offered, some free arts work on a magazine called Decanter. And I like them and they like me, and I kind of stayed and they gave me a job. So that's really how I got professionally flavor perspective. I I was interested in flavor. I was interested in food, and then I found myself being given an entree into the professional world of wine and realized that there were a lot of things that that there were a lot of similarities between the world of food and the world of wine in terms of flavor. But also, wine is such a many layered thing that it gave me an opportunity to indulge the scientific side of my interest as well as the more kind of humanity side of my interest. I I enjoy history. I enjoy, geography, but I also enjoy chemistry and biology. And wine was a way of uniting all of that as well as indulging my love of flavor and my love of traveling. Yeah. That's interesting, and you're you're certainly not the first wine writer who's expressed that kind of journey, if you like, that coming together of history, geography, science, travel. Wine really is, in some ways, the perfect vehicle to bring together all those interests in one bottle or glass. Mhmm. So you you began writing with, or or working with Decanter. You you then decide to embark on the the master of wine program that was later? Yes. That was a few years later. I loved my time at Decanter initially as a freelance, and then I worked as the deputy editor on the website. And then about a year into my job, I lost my job because it was really the start of websites and they haven't worked out how to make money from from websites. So, unfortunately, I lost my job but decided to carry on freelancing. And that must have been, gosh, at the tail end of 2001. So I really kind of started to hit my stride as a freelancer in 2002, 2003, and there were a lot of magazines at the time. And by 2008, with the economy crashing all around us and increasing concerns about the health aspects of drinking, which led to that all sort of led to a reduction in the advertising income that publications focused on wine were receiving. So it became more and more difficult to make make a living as a freelance writer. And I had a friend who was a master of wine who kept saying, you really should do the master of wine, you know? And I kept saying, no, it's scary. It's too big. I don't think I'm up to it. And she kept saying, no, no, no, no. You should do it. And, and finally, I decided in 2008 that if I wanted to stay working in wine, I really needed to make people aware that that, you know, not only was I a writer, but I was, you know, I knew what I was talking about. And the master of wine program seemed like a way of of proving my my bona fides, if if you if you like, despite the fact that I knew that it was going to be a bit of a challenge achieving that. So I signed up as a student and got stuck into my studies. At a time it was a really good time for me to do that because I was less busy on the work front and I was very lucky in that my husband absolutely backed me to the hilt both in terms of kind of emotional support and practical support. So I sat my exams for the first time in, I think, it was 2010, and I passed my theory exams the first time around. And then in 2011, I passed my practical papers, And I then got stuck on my dissertation, which Mhmm. Wasn't much fun, but I I stuck with it. And in 2014, I graduated. Fantastic. Extremely growing process, I think. It really is. And and, you know, I I remember coming out from, the feedback from a 12 wine blind tasting paper with a colleague of mine who turned around to me afterwards and said, you know, I have never felt as good about myself and as bad about myself as I have in the course of the past hour and a half. And and it really, you know, you really hit the highs and the lows when you get it right. You feel on top of the world, when you get it badly wrong. Oh, god. Do you feel like an idiot or what? But you excelled really in in many ways in that process, winning four out of the seven prizes awarded that year, including the outstanding achievement award for the best overall performance. Oh, look. I mean, I I put the fact that I won a number of awards down to the fact that I had a small graduating class. You know, if if there's 20 of you, it's very difficult to stand out from the crowd because there are so many incredibly talented, hardworking people. But there were only six in my graduating class, So the the odds were in my favor. Well, I I'm sure it was entirely, with merit as well, an an outstanding achievement. What does it mean in practice? Or you mentioned those years of economic uncertainty, I suppose, as a wine writer and and being a freelance worker. What what does the master of wine mean for you now in practice? What does it mean for your career? Well, I still write, but I also do a lot of teaching, particularly MW students and also, dipl