Among the ways that working at Benjamin Bridge can be so fun is that even something as routine as taking inventory is fascinating.

Take this year, for example, when our team was tasked with completing an exact count of the wine library. To be honest, there was a little grumbling, but among what we found were small quantities of several wines that had quietly slipped from memory - unexpected discoveries that we’ll be sharing with BB Club members over the coming months.

Some members might remember a red wine called Taurus, originally made entirely from Marechal Foch grapes, Foch being a variety that nearly everyone planted as the Nova Scotia wine industry began taking shape at the end of the last century.

Foch was known chiefly for its hardiness, and crafting a wine that was truly pleasing to the palate was a challenge to winemakers.

“Maybe one way to put it is that we always felt there was a uniqueness to the wine – I wouldn’t call it an idiosyncrasy – but a uniqueness, and we wanted to find a package that would help communicate to the consumer that this could be extraordinary, and simultaneously slightly outside the box,” Benjamin Bridge head winemaker Jean-Benoit Deslauriers said of the early Taurus, first produced in 2004.

As wineries experimented with which red grapes would thrive in the Gaspereau Valley, Deslauriers tinkered with Taurus, while also searching for a bottle as distinctive as the wine itself.

“The Regine bottle is an Italian bottle, actually, produced in Italy and that we bought for the first time from an Italian supplier based in Montreal named Bruni Glass, in 2011,” he said.

From its beginning as a single varietal wine, Taurus evolved to comprise several grapes, including Frontenac Red, Marquette, petite pearl and Leon Millot.

“I think you could describe that process as throwing several blends at the wall to see which ones stick. We were trying to see if there was a synergy between some of those varieties that could result in a red wine that was the best possible iteration we could make,” said Deslauriers, who recently opened a Regine bottle of Taurus for the first time in at least five years. “There was no questioning the longevity of the wine. Whether its profile is universal or will be everyone’s cup of tea, that’s a separate question, but you can independently get a sense of the wine’s longevity – has it oxidized, is it over the hill? – and the answer to that question is unquestionably no. It remains remarkably youthful and bright, which is really promising as far as the future that it could have in front of it.”

Production of Taurus ceased as of the 2019 vintage, when the Regine bottle stopped being available at about the same time all of our Foch vines had been replaced with other varieties.

“There’s a bit of what one could call a natural selection of product within the portfolio,” Deslauriers said. “The cellaring of the Taurus wasn’t so much by design, it wasn’t that we had this strategic idea to let it age for that long…it was simply something that slipped out of view. What we see here, potentially, is an extraordinary redemption story where that wine, after being off the radar for years, is now resurfacing.”