Wine and Farm Dinner collab with Unsworth Vineyards and Square Root Farms

The Lakehouse in Shawnigan is hosting a 5-course dinner put together by Chefs Richard Dykeman and Scott Walmsley featuring vegetables from Square Root Farm, run by Chrystal and Ilya, on the Saanich Peninsula. Each course will be paired with wines from Unsworth Vineyard in Mill Bay. We will have Chris Turyk, the Marketing Director and Sommelier, to talk about the wines, their direction and to answer your questions. The wines will range from bubbly and bright, to deep and complex reds. We look forward to hosting you in our cozy space for a special evening celebrating local producers.

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A little bit about the producers:

Square Root Farm is a small family farm on the Saanich Peninsula run by partners Chrystal and Ilya along with our hard-working seasonal farm-hands. We are proud that our farm is certified-organic with IOPA (Islands Organic Producers Association). This means that we are committed to protecting and enhancing biodiversity on our farm and to growing high quality vegetables without using pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.

We grow on about 7 acres of rich, wet clay soil that we enrich with thick cover-crops of rye, pea, vetch and clover.

We grow too many vegetable to list here and we try hard to have a diversity of crops at all times of the year. We only grow varieties that we think have the best flavour; each year we scour catalogs from numerous independent organic seed producers as well as bigger seed suppliers for our favourite carrot, kale and squash seeds. It’s important to us that our vegetables taste as fresh and delicious as possible so we are very choosy with our crops.

We specialize in chicories: endives, escaroles, dandelion, radicchio, and puntarelle. We grow these because we love them. Please give them a try. It can take a bit of practice for some people to learn to appreciate the bitter flavor but it’s worth it. It’s a whole other layer of incredible flavour that most people have been missing out on. I can’t imagine meals without chicory!

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Unsworth: No question, rain is in play on Canada’s west coast and a big reason why it’s so green and beautiful, but what makes Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley so special is best said by the First Nations Salish translation of ‘Cowichan’: warm land.

There’s a Mediterranean-like microclimate here that makes grapes (and winemakers) very happy—especially the mild, year-round average temperature that’s warmer than anywhere else in Canada.

As part of our commitment to sustainable vineyard practices, we grow varieties that are suitable for our unique climate and require the least amount of intervention. These include disease tolerant, early ripening varieties that have been developed in the coastal region, for the coastal region.

Committed to making wines that reflect the exceptional soil and growing conditions of the Cowichan Valley, winemaker Dan Wright and his team currently farm 12 acres of grape varieties at Unsworth Vineyards. The oldest block is Marechal Foch, which was planted in 2007—the grape behind our award-winning Ovation.

In the summer of 2011, several Blattner varieties were planted, which have become big players in the orchestration of our Allegro and Symphony blends.

While wine enthusiasts may initially pause when introduced to these new wine varieties and innovative blends, one taste typically does it. More mainstream Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir were planted in 2013 and now supplement grapes grown for us by neighbouring vineyard partners.

After harvesting the grapes once the flavours have reached their peak and the tannins are at their softest, that same artisan philosophy is applied to winemaking: taste and instinct reinforced by science and method. Using leading edge equipment, we roll-up-our-sleeves and diligently tend to every stage of the winemaking process.

Small production by design, we focus on handcrafted wines of distinction using signature techniques that showcase the very best of the fruit we grow.