Bluenose Wines - An Interesting Tale With A Local Twist

Courtesy BluenoseWines.com

We ran across a story in our local newspaper the Chronicle Herald this week about a Sonoma Winery with a local connection (read the story here).  The core part of the piece mentioned that the winery owner, Paul Brasset helped Clos Du Bois get its start and was the winemaker at White Oak Winery.

For anyone who has been to Sonoma, you immediately get hit with that smell.  The vineyards, the yeast, the diesel from the trucks.  It is a unique place.  The cool thing about our trip was that those two wineries were on our first day of tastings way back in 2004.  We started at Clos Du Bois with an awesome tasting staffer.  She basically set out our tour of the area by giving us the inside scoop on where she thought we should go based upon our tastes.  She pulled out a map and started going through the list, "Go here for sure, their Zins are awesome but skip these guys, they are jerks and their tasting room is filthy."  Awesome advice.  She directed us to White Oak and we showed up at closing time.  The nice tasting room staff let us in and gave us a great presentation of their wines.  It was another great experience.  We bought a bottle there and kept it until last year as a 2001, more on that here.

So reading that Paul from Bluenose Wines had a hand in those two wineries was very cool.  Beyond that he is making Sonoma Wines....Zinfandel, Syrah, and Chardonnay.  At 1500 cases a year, he is a small producer but it sounds like we are going to get to try some of his wines up this way.  He stated in the article that though his family left Nova Scotia in 1959, he has always had a strong connection to the place.  Now for the uninformed, residents of Nova Scotia are nicknamed "Bluenosers".  Depending on your source, this refers to those sailors and fishermen of old who would come ashore off the North Atlantic, drenched and nearly frozen to death with noses so red that they were blue....OR due to the fact that they used to wear woolen mittens dyed blue which would wind up on their noses when wiping them while on the high seas.  Either way, the nickname has stuck. So for a transplanted Nova Scotian to name their wineries after us, it is more than just a little interesting.

We look forward to tracking down some of the selections when they arrive as they will be limited quantities. Hopefully, it doesn't sell out for the gimmick factor alone.  Someone who has had a hand in both Clos Du Bois and White Oak can't be bad in our books.  If we are able to get our hands on a bottle or two...there will be a review.  Oh yes, there will be a review.

Keep on tasting!

Chris & Shannon