Monique Tamminga

Times Reporter

In July, on Bastille Day, Vista D’oro owners Patrick and Lee Murphy invited all their friends and family to come pick ripening green walnuts from the more than 100 year old trees that tower over their bucolic south Langley vineyard and farm.

The Murphys hung ropes from the trees for the kids to swing on, while everyone picked the tasty walnuts and then halved them until their hands turned black.

Those walnuts are now swimming in brandy for the next nine months before they are joined into a melange of Bordeaux-style blends of merlot, cabaret franc and marachel foch to create the Fraser Valley’s first and only walnut wine. The rich, delicious texture of this Langley fortified wine (styled like a port) has similarities to a fine 10-year-tawny, with slight hints of walnut in the finish.

“It was three years of test batches,” said Patrick, who has expanded their culinary agri-tourism offerings of orchard fruits, spreads and preserves into a winery with a tasting room.

Patrick comes from a family of wine makers and remembers making wine with his grandfather. The recipe for the walnut wine dates back to 1796.

But Murphy has tracked down the original maker — Jean-Baptiste Dudicourt, a farmer in norther France who was born in 1885.

Every Bastille day he picked green walnuts to make this fortified wine using his family recipe. Then Dudicourt went to war. But before he left, he said to his family, “If I don’t come back drink it all in celebration of life.”

Well, he made it back and lived to the ripe old age of 94, drinking many glasses of his walnut wine.

This summer Vista D’ora is offering up the walnut wine (aptly named the D’oro. )

They also have been selling a whites and reds offered in a new tasting room which shares space nicely with Lee’s home-made wine jellies and spreads Vista D’Oro has become so well known for.

The Murphys, who gave up a life in the corporate world to start an agri-culinary experience on a 10 acre property, are still in love with what they do, especially how their orchard comes into season — like their apples and plums which are ripe for the picking now.

Patrick has planted five acres of vines including a pinot gris and ortega grapes that will be ready to make into wine in two years, he said.

After sunset, he can be found tending to his vines, pulling weeds by hand. As is always the case with the Murphys, Patrick has found an environmentally friendly way to keep the voles from eating the roots of his vines and decimating his crop.

His resident barn owls keep the population down.

“We see them go out at night and fly away with voles,” he said. He’s also using a rain barrel system to water his crops which include pear, apple and plum trees.

Lee’s prized heirloom tomatoes, (which is where Vista D’oro was founded on) are all spoken for already this year.

The D’oro was recently approved by VQA and can then be sold at liquor stores. Vista D’oro Farms is located at 20856 4 Avenue or vistadoro.com.

The Fraser Valley has become a hotbed for wineries, with Langley boasting six wineries.