(France24) - The ritual uncorking of Beaujolais Nouveau wines each November began at midnight on Thursday, part of an annual marketing campaign aimed at elevating a young wine that shares little with its more mature and refined French cousins.

The wine world’s best-known party is beginning – the ritual uncorking of Beaujolais Nouveau every November. That’s both a curse and a blessing for the famed French region and its lesser-known yet finer wines.

Beaujolais Nouveau is easy to drink, but everything a fine wine is not: young, poor in tannins and not suited to storage. It’s partially because new wines could never hope to stir the imagination the way that the great wines of Bordeaux or Champagne do that the makers of Beaujolais Nouveau resorted to what has become a hugely successful marketing campaign.

It’s an operation “to bring value to a wine that is not part of the mythology of French wines,” said Serge Michels, vice president of Proteines, an agribusiness consultancy.

And so, as they do every year, bars and wine shops the world over uncorked the first bottles of the 2013 Beaujolais Nouveau at midnight on Wednesday. What started as the very first chance to taste a given year’s wine in Paris years ago has led to parties as far away as Japan and the United States.

“The party has started,” said Bernard Rogue-Bouge as the new wine flowed from a barrel in his Au Petit Chavignol Restaurant in Paris. “Cheers! To the Beaujolais!”

Speed is part of its mystique. Beaujolais Nouveau is typically flown to its customers, while other wines travel by ship.