by Georgina Montgomery,
photos by Kevin Oke

In the hills behind Duncan, bordered on the north by the Cowichan River, are the old logging and farming areas of Glenora and Deerholme. Many of the original homesteads in this area are gone now, but others have held on in whole or in part, abetted by burgeoning interest in small-scale, organic farm operations and the establishment of three wineries: Zanatta, Godfrey-Brownell and Echo Valley.

Vigneti Zanatta was Vancouver Island’s first commercial vineyard. It was established by Dennis Dionisio Zanatta, who immigrated to Canada from Treviso, Italy, in 1950. He moved his family to an old dairy farm in Glenora in 1959. On the side he began experimenting with grape-plantings down his fields’ sun-soaked slopes. In the 1980s Zanatta’s property became the site of more earnest grape-growing trials supported by the provincial agriculture ministry, assessing dozens of varietals to see which might show the best yields in the area’s soil and climate. The Duncan Project continued for seven years before funding was pulled. Tentative results at that point suggested Ortega, Auxerrois and Pinot Gris might offer the best bets, but the report authors said that more definitive conclusions would have required at least another two decades of trials. Such testing has since been left to grape growers themselves over the past decade and a half.

Since opening in 1992, Vigneti Zanatta has continued to expand its vineyards and now has 12 hectares (30 acres) planted in more than 40 different varieties of grapes. Dennis Zanatta, often referred to as the godfather of the Cowichan’s wine business, died in June 2008. His daughter Loretta, who trained as a winemaker in Italy, has managed the business and restaurant for many years with her husband Jim Moody, also a winemaker. Summertime lunch on the veranda of the property’s 1903 farmhouse, overlooking the warm hills of Glenora, can be life-altering.

Barely a popped-cork distance down the road from Zanatta, a little deeper into Glenora, is Godfrey-Brownell Vineyard started by Dave and Ellen Godfrey. They bought the former farm property in 1998 and put their first vines in the following year. Dave was born in Manitoba and spent much of his pre-Cowichan life in Toronto and Victoria, where it would seem he hardly had time to drink wine, let alone think of making it. A former university English professor, Governor General’s Award winner and book publisher (one of his companies was the first to publish Michael Ondaatje), he and Ellen also once set up a software company that developed an early internet service provider. When all that was out of the way and his mind did turn to grape-growing, Dave looked to the Cowichan and zeroed in on this Glenora land. By complete coincidence he discovered that he’d honed in on the 1886 homestead of a long-ago relative, Amos Aaron Brownell. It only seemed right to make Amos a posthumous partner in the vineyard and hence Brownell was added to the name.

Dave is grateful for the advice and guidance he got from neighbour Dennis Zanatta through Godfrey-Brownell’s early years. The winemaking community, he notes, is largely a collection of independent-minded individuals. “Once I was putting together an anthology of the work of thirteen poets. Each of them wanted to get 10 percent of the book,” he recounts and then, after a pause, continues, “Winemakers are like poets.”

Maple Bay

“A friend told me of a place like this, ‘So beautiful I couldn’t spit.’”

Thus wrote historian and poet Charles Lillard, not specifically about the five-kilometre (three-mile) stretch from Maple Bay to Genoa Bay, though if he’d come this way he surely would have thought it fair comment. From busy Bird’s Eye Cove, the road threads its way up and into a narrow valley, a demure presence between Stoney Hill and the hulking backside of Mount Tzouhalem, passing a handful of houses and a couple of small farms. It’s a picture of tranquility and tidiness, though the barn-sized rock chunks scattered in some fields point to a long-ago moment when Tzouhalem shuddered.

A strong earthquake may have rattled the conglomerate chunks loose and landslides may have brought them down. (Another theory is that erosion shifted these boulders from the upper part of the mountain to the bottom.) Cowichan elders relate vivid oral accounts about an earthquake in this area, and geologic evidence shows that the last of several major earthquakes in the Cascadia Subduction Zone occurred on January 26, 1700.

Glenora Bay

At the end of the road, the community of Genoa Bay is a tiny hooked finger of private homes and a marina, thought to be named after the home port of early settler Giovanni Baptiste Ordano. The place does have an out-of-the-way feel if not exactly foreign. The enduring Genoa Bay Café overlooking the marina has been voted, as the sign in the parking lot proclaims, “The Best Restaurant in Genoa Bay!” It’s definitely that and has attracted diners for years, those only too happy for an excuse to drive the road in.

Its sleepiness today is well earned, Genoa Bay having once hummed with the largest sawmill in the British Empire. Milling began here in 1873 and continued to 1925. Trees cut at Cowichan Lake and sent downriver were collected in booms off the Cowichan estuary and floated across the water. Millions of board feet of lumber were shipped out by sailing ship and freighter to destinations around the world.

Float Homes

After the mill closed for good, its 60-some buildings stood abandoned. Not until 1941 did the provincial government give the property’s new owner permission to clear out the site. A large, well-appointed resort rose in its place. In 1959 this was sold to a William Morgan, who renamed it Captain Morgan’s Lodge. Morgan was—or was widely believed to be—descended from the nasty (and knighted for it) privateer Sir Henry Morgan, governor of Jamaica in the 1600s. The fact that the large Canadian distiller Seagram’s made a rum called Captain Morgan’s only lent the lodge further pizzazz, creating an exotic if erroneous association. Overnight the newly branded lodge became the destination of holidayers from near and far. As G. McCurdy Gould wrote in her history of Genoa Bay, “Airplanes made scheduled trips into the bay on weekends. Launches ran from Victoria and Vancouver. Athletic young chaps were known to paddle canoes from Oak Bay to Genoa Bay for the Saturday night dances.”