Western Canada: Touring Farms and Wineries on Vancouver Island

Continued from Up to the Aerie, Vancouver Island

One morning of our late-May stay on Vancouver Island, we joined Kathy McAree of Travel With Taste for a full day’s tour of the Island’s winery-and-farm-filled Cowichan Valley.

Oh yes, there were cheeses. And breads. And wines, hard cider and a three-course lunch. There was also weeping, but of a purely joyful variety.

Kathy, a passionate foodie, has personal relationships with farmers, vintners, restauranteurs and food artisans all over the Victoria area. A former Canadian sales rep for Kellogg’s who used to drive far and wide to supermarkets for her work, she now goes to grocery stores just for fun.

Our first stop was Cowichan Bay. This 1800s-era village sits on a picturesque marina, its water strung with delicate eelgrass. Here an artisanal bakery with its own flour mill, True Grain Bread & Mill, sits next to Hilary’s Cheese & Deli. Clever placement, as it’s always best to eat a carb with a protein.

True Grain makes a dizzying array of leavened treats, some of which use grains like spelt, kamut, and red fife (all ancient forms of wheat).  Because of my wheat allergy, spelt tends to be a milder choice when bread’s on the menu; True Grain has spelt baguettes, sandwich rolls, and two kinds of cookies, including oatmeal chocolate chip. Adam, who has no such tragic affliction, was content with a great big cinnamon bun.

Kathy had one of the bakers put together a board of breads, pastries and cookies for the three of us to share, which we enjoyed with really good Salt Spring Coffee, grown and roasted on nearby Salt Spring Island.

We took some spelt baguette next door to Hilary’s and tried a variety of cheeses handmade in the area.  The deli is run by the wife of Hilary Abbott, Cowichan Bay’s resident cheesemaker; from a table overlooking the bay, we sampled his delicious Red Dawn, its rind washed in local blackberry port.  We also enjoyed cheddar from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks, and again from Salt Spring Island, a beautiful blue cheese from Moonstruck.

Because we’d expressed a desire to see cheese being made, we were taken to the home farm of Hilary himself, and introduced to the myriad (and required) stainless steel contraptions, hoses, and water temperatures.  Hilary has a white mustache, twinkling smile, incongruous pink Crocs and a funny little Japanese truck that he uses to hand-deliver his cheese around the island. His cheeseworks, dominated by temperature vats from Nebraska, are two antiseptically clean rooms beneath his house, where he’s helped by a local woman who gives him what time she can to help endlessly stir, fold and skim whey from milk. Just outside, a neighbor’s cows graze at the top of a gentle slope dotted with trees and island hills, serving as the farm’s lawnmowers.

From here we headed out to nearby Cobble Hill and the Cherry Point Vineyard to taste the first wines of the day. Cherry Point, owned by the local Haida tribe, is as architecturally tricked-out as any winery in the Napa Valley. Gleaming wood and glass, soft garden landscaping, and a wide slate patio in back all surround a converted greenhouse that serves as a rustically elegant dining room, overlooking the vines themselves. The patio serves as an outdoor bistro, and features a traditional First Nations salmon barbecue pit that uses split logs of alderwood and long crossed poles for holding the fish; for the fish itself, no seasoning is necessary.

We were given our own private tour of Cherry Point’s forest-bordered vines while eagles circled overhead. It’s not easy to grow grapes in a wild, heavily wooded place that’s only reliably sunny for three months out of the year, but yet, there they were. While most of their wines taste young and very tight (save their popular blackberry port), their use of some unique grapes makes for an interesting tour.

The winery uses two grapes we’d never heard of: Agria, from Hungary, which not only has entirely red fruit but also dark red leaves; and Ortega, a German hybrid named for a Spanish philosopher, developed for hardiness in cold weather. The latter is widespread on Vancouver Island, having proven itself hardy here.

Ortega is put to tastier use at nearby, family-run Blue Grouse Vineyards. Hans Klitz, the family patriarch, is originally from Germany, and before becoming a vintner was a large-animal vet in the African Congo. By all appearances a deeply humorless man, Klitz nonetheless has a glint in his eye and a passion for his wines. The focus here is on rounded whites, and many local restaurants carry them on their lists. His cozy tasting room is beneath his rhododendron and kiwi vine-draped home, and looks out over his grapes. Besides their Ortega, we would highly recommend the Bacchus, which, like a dry riesling, would pair well with Asian food.

We also visited the private farm of Kathy’s friend Lyle, owner of the island’s only organic chicken processing plant. In addition to having wonderful poultry and eggs, Lyle’s farm features his grandfather’s collection of old cars.  Parked all around the property in sheds and barns which are overhung with flowering vines and gently rusting farm equipment, the farm is so quaint and pretty looks like it’s ready for its own coffee table book (see photo above).

For instance, here a sleepy ram lay in tall grass beneath an old shade tree, a soft gray horse swatted flies from a fenced-in paddock, and a peek around a white picket gate revealed a lush vegetable garden. Out in front, two young women spread manure on the fields with that most Canadian of farm implements — hockey sticks.

* For more photos from this leg of our Canadian journey, click here.

Continued in Amuse Bistro on Vancouver Island