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With the rise of wine tourism, one thing has become almost certain: Make a great pinot noir and the Porsches will beat a path to your tasting room.

However, as Kim Pullen - a vintner toiling off the beaten track on Vancouver Island - has learned, sometimes the pinot noir has to be taken to where the Porsches are.

Mr. Pullen, owner of Church & State Wines on the outskirts of Victoria, has been promoting his wines at some unconventional venues, including the local Speedway Motors dealership on Douglas Street. But if the feedback he received four weeks ago during an event for the launch of a new roadster is any indication, his kick-the-tires, try-the-grapes strategy is paying off.

"People would come up to the little table we had set up and get a taste of wine and walk away with it and then stop," Mr. Pullen says. "They would turn around and go, 'This is really good.' We probably had that happen five times that day."

Exoticar shoppers aren't the only ones doing a double take. International wine judges are becoming impressed, too. In April, at the Pacific Rim International Wine Competition in San Bernadino, Calif., Church & State took home both a gold medal and best-in-class honours for its Pinot Noir Hollenbach Family Vineyard 2005.

The $21 red placed first in a field that included more expensive entries from such pinot noir Edens as Carneros in Napa Valley and sunny Santa Barbara, the latter the setting for the 2004 film Sideways, which turned pinot into a household name. Another Church & State red, a syrah, recently took home gold at the California Grand Harvest Awards.

One of 30 boutique island wineries off B.C.'s mainland, Church & State has over the past two years undergone a major makeover.

Now, it's leading the charge to pull the region out of the long shadow cast by the Okanagan Valley.

"I'm helping to carry the flag, and I'm hoping that I'm drawing good attention to us," Mr. Pullen says. "I hope that by [our wines] winning awards that people will say, 'I'm going to try these wines.' "

Several other offshore wineries have won critical acclaim since the area began to flourish in its own modest way around the mid- to late 1990s, including Alderlea Vineyards, Blue Grouse Estate, Venturi-Schulze, Salt Spring Vineyards and Saturna Island Family Estate. But most, run by passionate artisans, have taken the soft-sell approach, mainly because demand from local residents and restaurants has been voracious. The islands represent less than 1.5 per cent of the province's grape crop. Island wines are generally not available east of Alberta.

"I just don't make much fuss about it because I don't have enough product," says Hans Kiltz, owner of Blue Grouse in the Cowichan Valley, which like many of its neighbours specializes in hardy, unsung grape varieties such as ortega and bacchus that thrive better in the region's cool, short summers rather than the classic French varieties of the sun-drenched Okanagan. "My black muscat is already presold for next year."

Mr. Pullen, an entrepreneur who also owns the luxe Port Sidney Marina, on the other hand, has been banging the drum since taking over and renaming the former Victoria Estate Winery three years ago. When not in the vineyards, he can often be found dispensing samples at wine shows on the mainland and even wine-themed client-appreciation events for local banks.

For Mr. Pullen, the slog hasn't been easy. He plunged into the wine business after selling another business, a salmon farm, in 2004. Impressed with the imposing 22,000-square-foot winery building on the well-travelled tourist route to the Butchart floral gardens on the Saanich peninsula, he wasn't so keen on its tourist-trap reputation. After buying the property, he also quickly noticed that much of its cellar inventory ranged from substandard to putrid. About 3,000 cases of improperly clarified gewurztraminer had even begun refermenting in bottle, giving off carbon dioxide gas as a result of the presence of residual yeast and forcing cellar workers to dodge ballistic shards of glass from the regular explosions.

Within three months, he unceremoniously dumped 13,000 cases of the 20,000-case inventory into a quarry, hiring local youth to help pull the corks. "I could have dressed this wine up and sold it for maybe eight bucks," he says, "But I thought that if I'm going to make wine, I want to make the best wine possible."

After a "parting of the ways" with the winemaker, he brought aboard Bill Dyer, a noted California-based vintner and consultant who had spent 20 years at Napa Valley's Sterling Vineyards and created the acclaimed wines of Okanagan's Burrowing Owl Vineyards.

Mr. Dyer's first condition? Dump another 2,000 cases. The pair then started from scratch, sourcing the bulk of their fruit from prime vineyards in the Okanagan, some of them owned by Mr. Pullen.

Wise move.

The pinot noir that won the Pacific Rim competition was pressed from that Okanagan fruit, as was another red that took home a gold medal at the same show, Church & State Merlot Coyote Bowl Vineyard 2005.

It was also a controversial move. Church & State - the name is a play on what Mr. Pullen describes as his religious zeal against the dollar-driven secularism of Victoria Estate - has become a poster winery for a dispute over what should, and shouldn't, be called island wine.

Just 10 per cent of Mr. Pullen's 14,000-case annual production, big by island standards, is pressed from local fruit, with the balance coming from the mainland. Several other new wineries, including Morning Bay Vineyard, have adopted a similar practice to start the cash flowing while new island plantings come into production.

"It's a very bad thing," Blue Grouse's Mr. Kiltz, a German immigrant whose family has made wine for 350 years, says of the trend. "We're trying to establish an identity for Vancouver Island wines ... It's the same as if you went to France and they give you a wine from Argentina."

The issue is, in fact, a hot button all over the wine world, where aficionados tend to find romance in the notion that grapes, more than any other agricultural product, can telegraph nuances in local soils and weather patterns and thus should be bottled in small quantities as close to the source as possible.

Mr. Pullen notes in his defence that the source of his fruit is clearly marked on all his bottles. Not only that, Church & State has planted pinot noir and pinot gris on the estate, which boasts 11 acres under vine, considerably more than some neighbours.

Still others see the issue as a moot point. Greg Hays, owner of Cafe Brio, a Victoria restaurant, had for years refused to carry Vancouver Island wines made from mainland fruit out of principle. But he underwent a conversion recently while perusing his own restaurant's extensive wine list, which contains many celebrated foreign labels crafted by wineries using purchased, long-distance fruit. Case in point: Sonoma, Calif.-based Ravenswood's Lodi Zinfandel.

"When you stop to think about ... how many wineries out there really don't grow their own grapes," Mr. Hays says. "And yet we still buy their product because they're beautiful, beautiful wines."

Indeed, even the celebrated French producer E. Guigal, based in the northern Rhône city of Ampuis in France, makes a sought-after Châteauneuf-du-Pape with fruit bought from farmers in the southern Rhône.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Hays sampled four of Church & State's wines at a show - two syrahs, a pinot noir and a sauvignon blanc.

"They just blew me away," he says.

"I bought everything. And I have a full wine cellar. I have no place to put the stuff."

Decanter

Beppi Crosariol's wine

column will return.

Tasting notes

Church & State Pinot Noir Hollenbach Family Vineyard 2005 $21

Remarkably Burgundian in style, with ripe yet subtle plum-jam and raspberry fruit and hints of cinnamon and toast. Ideal for pork or coq au vin.

Church & State Merlot Coyote Bowl Vineyard 2005 $26

Elegant, medium full-bodied and silky, hinting at cherry, vanilla and chocolate, with nice peppery spice on the finish. Excellent merlot. Pair it with duck, pork or lamb.

Salt Spring Vineyards Aromata 2006 $17.90

A medium-bodied and appropriately named blend of aromatic gewurztraminer and bacchus grapes, teeming with ripe pear, lychee and tropical fruit, silky and crisp. Very impressive. Great for Asian food or Salt Spring lamb.

Salt Spring Vineyards

Reserve Pinot Noir 2005 $29.90

Light-bodied and crisp, reminiscent of a cru Beaujolais, with nuances of cherry and violet. Good red for fish such as grilled salmon.

Saturna Island Vineyards Pinot Gris 2005 $13.95

Pressed from the concentrated fruit of low-yielding vineyards, this light, silky white is a shade on the sweet side, offering nuances of peach, red apple and citrus. Nice match for spicy Asian fare.

Saturna Island Vineyards Pinot Noir 2005 $16.95

Swiss-trained winemaker Daniel Lagna, formerly of Mission Hill, has crafted a superlight yet remarkably authentic tasting pinot noir at an affordable price. Classic pinot flavours of crushed berries and underbrush come through in this ethereal, silky, slightly smoky red. Keep it away from big steaks, though. Try it with grilled salmon or mushroom risotto.

Beppi Crosariol