Drink These Now: The Best of B.C.’s Island Wines

From the sun-baked sand of Santorini to the craggy, windswept peaks of the Azores, island wines are definitely having their moment. Their calling card is vines that live under stress: tough, often volcanic soil and consistent, challenging winds produce grapes that have to work to get ripe. And they’re frequently made with less well-known grapes, as well—assyrtiko in Greece, arinto in the Azores, palomino in the Canary Islands—and the resulting wines are frequently low in alcohol, high in acidity and have an ever-present savoury salinity—exactly the type of wine you’d want when gazing wistfully out to sea. Our Southern Gulf Islands came about through tectonic shift, not violent eruption, but the best of our island wines still channel the focus and clarity that define the genre and have oenophiles spouting euphemisms like a sea captain.

1. Sea Star Vineyard Salish Sea, $24

For many of us, the first bottle of local island wine we experienced came from this Pender Island gem, whose low-price, high-quality rosé attracted a feverish following pre-COVID. They still make a version of that wine (and at $22, it’s still priced at pre-pandemic levels), but this easygoing white—made from siegerrebe and ortega—captures the seafaring feeling: herbaceous and salty with just enough tropical notes to keep it nailing the flip-flop vibe. Perfect post-paddleboard wine.

2. Kutatás Estate Pinot Noir 2022, $45

Located just north of Ganges is Kutatás (koo-tah-tash) where winemakers Mira Tusz and Daniel Dragert (formerly of Averill Creek on that other, much bigger island) are digging deep into the terroir of Salt Spring. This estate pinot may be the most serious of our island wines: made in small quantities, it has a tension that alludes to the struggles to ripen in a vineyard that sees very few heat spikes but plenty of cool evenings. The result feels like a wine from a different time—less polished and more crunch, but plenty of tart complexity and ageability.

3. A Sunday in August Island Vibes, $39

What is an island anyways? Many Vancouver Island wines are grown in inland valleys, so this is not exactly “island wine” in the coastal sense that we’re talking about here. But natty wine pioneer Michael Shindler sources the majority of grapes for his beloved label A Sunday in August from the more maritime Saanich Peninsula, and has planted grapes on Salt Spring that will be coming online next year. Until then, there’s the perfectly named Island Vibes, a punchy mashup of the marechal foch grape and the peachy ortega, which combine to hit like a wave crashing over a clipper ship.