Georges "King of Beaujolais" Duboeuf will be licking his lips, and lining his wallet, when tens of millions of bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau are opened worldwide tomorrow.
Few question the might of a well-oiled marketing machine and neatly orchestrated release, but some people fear price rises of around 20 per cent for Beaujolais Nouveau 2003 could quench the thirst for a wine that is meant to be cheap as well as cheerful.
Mr Duboeuf, who produces almost a fifth of all output, stresses that behind this year's smaller harvest and bigger sale price is a better drink.
"It's going to be an exceptional wine, probably the best I tasted in my long career," he told Reuters in an interview in his Beaujolais fiefdom of Romaneche-Thorins, a small village near the southeastern French city of Lyon.
As in every year since 1985, Mr Duboeuf knows consumers will queue up this evening for a first taste when bars from Tokyo to London to Toronto uncork their supplies as the clock strikes midnight in their time zones.
Shops can sell it hours later when they open tomorrow. (The tradition of releasing the wine on the third Thursday of November each year began in 1985).
Olivier Poussier, crowned top world sommelier wine-taster in 2000, shares Mr Duboeuf's enthusiasm for the subtle change of taste in this year's version of a wine that is just a few months old.
But he is wary on the price front. "There's a risk that consumers will turn their nose up this year," Mr Poussier said. "The average consumer does not really care that there is less production. He may think 'the wine is still not very good and what's more it's more expensive'."
French wine retail chain Nicolas says it will sell at €4.5 a bottle, 20 per cent up on last year.
"The fashion of Beaujolais Nouveau was already fading a bit and a rise in price won't help, so we've been very careful with our stocks this year," said head of marketing Michel Foucaud.
France's stock suffered this year from cold snaps followed by the heat wave that killed 15,000 old and sick people in the summer.
"Vineyards were hit in the spring by frost and winds that broke young branches, and then by a heat wave," Mr Duboeuf said. "Volumes fell sharply so we had to pay more to winemakers."
Mr Duboeuf, 70, has been in business for 40 years, combining Gamay wines from some 400 producers in the region.
While the tradition of serving very young wines is as old as time, it began to take off in the 1960s after a regulation on precise release dates that had wine buffs lining up at midnight to taste the "Nouveau" (New) when the time came.
Mr Duboeuf shared a large part of the credit for engineering an international hit from a light-weight, fruity, red wine that many serious wine fans dismiss.
One of the hallmarks was the distribution of posters around the world proclaiming: "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!".
By the 1980s the mania had crossed the Atlantic and Mr Duboeuf, who started his wine-selling rounds on a bike, was soon packing Concorde with cases of Beaujolais Nouveau and taking off at midnight in France to arrive before the bell in New York.
The United States is his biggest export market, followed by Canada, Britain and Japan. Other destinations include South Africa, South Korea, Romania and Armenia, Mr Duboeuf said.
Twenty years later Mr Duboeuf is set to produce seven million bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau - 75 per cent of which will be exported to some 120 countries.
The key of his success? "It's all tailor-made," he said in his bottling plant, showing labels in French, English, Italian and Japanese.
To dispatch millions of bottles in bars and restaurants in time for the release, Mr Duboeuf will use air, rail and road.
Around 100 trucks were expected every day at his base in Romaneche-Thorins in the run-up period.
Mr Duboeuf will be in Tokyo at launch time and his son Franck in New York.
"I'm inevitably nervous," he said. "With Beaujolais Nouveau it is like when a fashion designer presents his first collections, it gives an indication of what the vintage will taste like."