Many good things in British history started with a wager. Even the fictitious trip around the world in 80 days, described by a Frenchman, began with a bet in a London Club. The Beaujolais Run, a distinctive motoring event, a cross between a road trip, a memorable adventure and a gathering of charity-minded friends, started this way, too.
On November 18th, 1970, at the Hotel Maritonnes, Joseph Berkmann and Clement Freud were sharing a dinner of ‘Coq au Vin’. Owner of eight London restaurants, Berkmann also ran his own wine distribution company and wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Times. Clement Freud was Director of the London Playboy Club, a respectable Member of Parliament and wine correspondent for The Sun. As bottle succeeded bottle that night, the germ of an idea took shape. Sometime after midnight, they roared away from Romanèche with several cases of Beaujolais in the back of each car, having challenged each other to be the first to get their cases to London in the first Beaujolais race™.
That year and the next, the race was a purely private affair between Berkmann and Freud. Berkmann won both times. Having taken potshots at each other, through their respective wine columns, word got around that something interesting was going on, and others rushed to join in: The Beaujolais Run® was born. In 1973, Alan Hall, columnist for The Sunday Times, published an article that threw down the gauntlet to Fleet Street to ‘Bring Back the Beaujolais’ offering a bottle of Champagne for the first to deliver a bottle of the new vintage to his desk. At that time the object of the exercise was speed, and this was brought to an end by the RAF, who later took up the challenge in a Harrier jump jet, and broke all records. In 2006, by kind permission of His Grace, The Duke of Richmond, The Beaujolais Run® made its spiritual home at Goodwood.
In 2018, the Run was organized in cooperation with the RAF Benevolent Fund (www.rafbf.org) which was to benefit from the money raised during the event. It commemorated an anniversary of Operation Chastise, the famous bombing raid on the dams in the Ruhr Valley, performed with great courage by the famous 617 Squadron. The Avro Lancaster bombers took off from RAF Scampton, and the 2018 Beaujolais Run began at the exact same air base, now home to the Red Arrows. It followed the route of the raid, and ended, as always, with the taste of the New Beaujolais wine.
The 2019 event will celebrate the anniversary of the renowned Steve McQueen movie, “The Great Escape”, and will focus on escapes, neutral countries, and rotary-wing aircraft. The route shall remain secret until late next year. All types of cars are welcome, as the Run has seen supercars, classic cars, race cars, SUV’s, hybrids… In 2018 there was a Lotus, an AMG-Mercedes, a very fast Corvette and a hugely powerful Cobra-engined Ford P100 pickup truck. More information: www.beaujolaisrun.com
