Glenterra Vineyards: a gem in the Cowichan Valley
By John Schreiner
October 3, 2007
West Vancouver’s storied Park Royal Hotel, which was demolished a couple of years ago, lives on at the Glenterra winery on Cobble Hill Road in the Cowichan Valley.
Late last year, winery owners John Kelly and Ruth Luxton added an attractive 40-seat café (called Thistles because John is a Scot) to their small winery. The lead-pane windows which provide a great view over Glenterra’s vines were originally in the Park Royal Hotel. Kelly, who has a taste for antiques, found them in a Vancouver Island salvage yard and gave them a second life.
He and Luxton also share the nostalgia of the windows. In their lives before the winery, which opened in 2000, they lived in Vancouver and numbered themselves among Park Royal’s patrons.
Luxton, who is a chef, now creates imaginative cuisine that helps show off Kelly’s well-crafted wines. Glenterra makes, at the most, 700 cases of wine a year. The wines are not easy to find (the winery does not have a website by can be contacted at glenterravineyards@shaw.ca), with distribution limited primarily to Vancouver Island restaurants and the wine shop in one corner of Thistles.
Located just off the Island Highway, Glenterra’s seven-hectare property was previously called Ayl Moselle. Kelly and Luxton bought it in 1998 from John Harper, who had spent half his life on private grape growing trials, both in the Fraser Valley and on Vancouver Island.
He left behind at Ayl Moselle about an acre of vines comprising near 40 varieties, many obscure German grapes.. Kelly considered pulling them out. Then his frugality kicked in and he decided to blend them all into one red and one white wine since he had no other producing vines at the time. Vivace, the white blend, and Brio, are now among Glenterra’s best-selling wines.
Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Kelly has lived in Canada since 1969, so long that he has lost most of his Scots inflection. Becoming interested in wine in the 1970s, his passion was fired by a 1988 European backpacking vacation that included the vineyards of Bordeaux. “I was still buying inexpensive wines, of course, because I was on a budget,” he recalled. “When I got back, I started paying more for wines to educate my palate. It was an expensive education. You’ve got to drink the good stuff to know what it’s supposed to taste like.”
Kelly nurtured his interest in wine while running a successful, if mundane, Vancouver business that made traffic signs. “Around 1995, I was fed up with what I was doing and I thought it was time to make a change,” he remembered. He enrolled in the two-year program at Okanagan University College in Penticton, where he could study during the week, run his Vancouver business on weekends, and begin searching for a vineyard property. Kelly and Luxton, who prefer living near the west coast, chose the Cowichan Valley because it was the only region outside the Okanagan with enough wineries to attract wine tourists. “We had to be where there are other wineries, so we could at least have half a chance of succeeding,” Kelly said.
Like several other island wineries, Glenterra launched itself primarily with wines made from Okanagan grapes. Kelly could not afford to wait until his own vineyard was producing. Glenterra endured some criticism for this from several Cowichan wineries that are exclusively estate producers. Kelly shrugged it off as “petty political crap.”
Planting continuously since 1999, Kelly now grows primarily Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir and Gewürztraminer, along with the Harper trial block. Only limited quantities of Okanagan grapes are purchased as Glenterra has become primarily a producer of estate-grown wines. These are the wines currently available:
Pinot Blanc 2006 ($22) Barrel-fermented and oak-aged, this takes the measure of most Okanagan Chardonnays. The wine shows some oak notes in the spicy aroma. On the palate, it presents luscious tropical fruit flavours, with refreshing acidity to give crispness to the finish. 89
Pinot Gris 2006 ($20) Here, Kelly fermented one quarter in barrel, the rest in tank and then aged it all on the lees. The result is a delicious wine, with a lemon and lime notes, a core of peachy fruit and a polished, elegant texture. 88
Pinot Noir 2006 ($28) This will be released December 1, having been aged in new French oak. Still firm in texture, it has a brilliant jewelled hue, with cherry and raspberry flavours. Lighter than Okanagan Pinot Noir but quite charming. 88
Brio 2006 3 Vineyards ($22) This red is a blend from Kelly’s vineyard and two others in the Cowichan Valley. I challenge you to find a more eclectic blend: Dornfelder, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Dunkelfelder, Zweigelt, Früburgunder, Cabernet Franc, Agria, Lemberger, Haroldrebe, Helfensteiner, Korento. This eccentric but interesting wine is gamy, herbaceous and a touch tart, with flavours of red currants. I’d pair it with bison burgers. 85
John Schreiner is author of British Columbia Wine Country
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