Beaufort Vineyard & Estate Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Alex Guertin’s winery began as an idea at a family Christmas. A friend then told him of one for sale in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island. In 2021 he, Sylvie Senay and Rolland Tanguay bought Beaufort Vineyard & Estate Winery from its second owner, Hollywood’s James Cameron.

Susan and Jeff Vandermolen had started it. They bought the land in 2005 after careers in the oil industry, planted the first vines in 2007 and opened in 2008. Cameron paid $2.7 million in February 2014 and put the estate up for sale in August 2020 at $5.6 million. The winery says its vineyard was certified organic by September 2019, in his time, and CHEK News reported it as the first certified organic vineyard on Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island is a small corner of Canadian wine, with 17 licensed grape wineries to the Okanagan’s 196. Wine BC calls its climate Canada’s only maritime Mediterranean one, with wet winters and warm, dry summers, and a rain shadow from the westerly storms leaves the island’s eastern side dry enough for grapes. At Beaufort, the winery says, the Georgia Strait evens out the temperature and the Beaufort Mountain Range blocks the Pacific storms. When the cold of January 2024 left the province’s wineries projecting the loss of almost a whole year’s crop, BC Wine Trends reported that the island “escaped the worst of the damage”. The wine blog MyWinePal sums up Beaufort’s grapes as “white aromatic and hybrids”. Siegerrebe, for one, is a crossing of Gewürztraminer and Madeleine Angevine, and Petit Milo is a hybrid that ripens early and resists disease. The exception is Pinot Noir — British Columbia’s second most-planted grape, and a fussy, thin-skinned one. In the province’s cooler regions, long growing seasons keep its acidity and bring out delicate red fruit and savoury flavours, so expect a lighter, fresher red than Pinot from somewhere warm, tart rather than jammy. Small as the island’s output is, its wineries took seven Pinot Noir medals at the 2026 National Wine Awards of Canada.

Almost all the vineyard work is done by hand, and Guertin told Food, Wine & Travel that the nets go up with hockey sticks. Cohen Brown manages the vines. Stephanie Clarke, who came from Unsworth Vineyards in 2023, makes the wine, about 30,000 bottles a year by the magazine’s count. The Organic Pinot Noir 2024 came to only four barrels of estate fruit, bottled unfiltered at 11.5 per cent alcohol, which is light for a red. WineAlign scores it 89 out of 100, as it did the Pinot Noir 2023.

Not every Beaufort bottle is certified, so the name and the vintage matter. PACS certifies the vineyard’s wine grapes, and its hazelnuts. Ecocert Canada has certified the winery since 20 October 2022, and only the wines its certificate names, vintage by vintage from 2022 to 2025, are certified organic. The Pinot Noir 2023 and 2024 are among them. Zephra, a sparkling wine the estate made under the Camerons, is not, and neither are Epic, Big Nose Red, any Chardonnay or any vintage before 2022. The winery calls itself Vancouver Island’s first certified organic winery.