A decade and a half into its life as a premium Canadian winery, Unsworth Vineyards is undergoing major changes. First, and most prominently, is a new winemaking facility and tasting room at Unsworth, nestled on 32 acres of Cowichan Valley farmland, four kilometres south of Cobble Hill and just west of the Mill Bay turnoff on Highway 1. The new complex, under construction for nearly a year and a half, has just been completed. And come fall, Unsworth will start a renovation of the restaurant in its early-1900s farmhouse.
For now, it’s the splashy new complex that is garnering attention.
“We have a white [wine] barrel cellar, a red barrel cellar and then the fermentation floor, more office space, more dry goods space, lab and bottling line — all the essentials we don’t have room for currently,” says Chris Turyk, Unsworth’s marketing and sales director.
Unsworth Vineyards started out as a family affair, with businessman Tim Turyk (Chris’s father) buying 32 acres of Cowichan Valley farmland in 2009. Eleven years later, the Turyks sold their growing business to Barbara Banke and Julia Jackson, members and part owners of the Sonoma Valley, California-based Jackson Family Wines, whose global reach and deep pockets have set up Unsworth for the next stage of its evolution.
Unsworth currently produces 120,000 to 140,000 bottles a year, principally Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and its sparkling Charme de L’île, but not exclusively.
The winery brought in Marko Simcic, of Vancouver-based Simcic Architecture Studio, to design the new complex. Joined by general contractor Heatherbrae Builders, they broke ground on the project in April 2024, after a year of planning and design work.
“We wanted it to resemble farm country,” says Turyk. “We wanted it to fit into the rural, agrarian, low-slung building, which is why we excavated down quite a bit, and we’re building up the berms around it so that it doesn’t look imposing. It kind of looks like one of the dairy barns in a way. That’s part of the reason the cladding is sort of that ‘foresty’ green, so when all the landscaping is in it will blend quite nicely.”
A new tasting room is a highlight of the new complex, replacing the 14-year-old tasting room that will be torn down. “There’s a bunch of regulations about [buildings’] footprint on ALR [agricultural land reserve] land, and with the tasting room as well — we knew in 2014, two or three years after we opened it, that it was undersized,” says Turyk.
An expanded production facility and tasting room reflect the evolution of Unsworth’s business, as it has planted 43 more acres of vineyard on a non-adjacent property in north Cowichan. That new acreage — on a 60-acre property bought in 2020 — will join the 10 acres of vineyard on the 32-acre estate property to essentially double the winery’s production by 2028, when the new fruit is harvested and vinified.
As Turyk puts it, “Our current winery just doesn’t have the footprint to accommodate the added volume.”
