The Quest for Canadian Wine Sovereignty

Winemakers across Canada have struggled in the past few years with a biblical litany of natural disasters: fires, floods, hurricanes and temperatures both bone-chilling and broiling. The result has been dead vines, lost harvests and hundreds of millions of dollars lost. 

In Ontario, Niagara winemakers faced a severe grape shortage in 2022, after a combination of heavy rains and a cold snap damaged roughly half the region’s grape vines. In 2023, a polar vortex descended on Nova Scotia, costing the province’s fledgling wine industry one-quarter of its crop. That fall, Hurricane Lee blew through the province, damaging vineyards. That was the same year that a freakish cold snap laid waste to British Columbia’s wine harvest, cutting production nearly in half. The province’s winemakers hoped to make up their losses the following year—only to face another blast of Arctic air in 2024, which wiped out nearly all the grapes, costing the region an estimated $445 million. (Things got even bleaker later that year, when wildfires cut the summer tourism season short.)

Losing a harvest is difficult. Replanting an entire vineyard is a disaster, especially for small growers who don’t have the roughly $40,000 per acre needed to plant new vines, let alone wait three years for them to bear fruit. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of for-sale signs hanging up in the Okanagan this past year. 

Related: How to Rescue Canada’s Wine Supply

This extreme weather is only going to get more extreme. Freak cold snaps and heat domes will become more common, hurricanes will get more violent and wildfires will grow bigger. And every time disasters damage a harvest, they put another dent in an industry that’s worth, according to the Wine Growers of Canada, more than $11 billion annually in Canada, from coast to coast. In B.C., 326 wineries attract a million visitors per year; in Ontario, they draw more than 2.6 million and, in Nova Scotia, an up-and-comer region, they bring in 150,000 visitors and employ about 1,100 people. 

But the changing climate is also presenting new opportunities. Warmer summers have made it possible for producers like Niagara’s Hidden Bench and Okanagan’s Martin’s Lane to go all-in on terroir-driven, fully-ripened pinot noir. Longer “hang times” in Nova Scotia have led to more complex bubbly at wineries like Benjamin Bridge, Lightfoot & Wolfville and Blomidon. And rising temperatures are opening new frontiers altogether, pushing vineyards into northern and eastern Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and several regions in Quebec—there’s even one north of Shawinigan. 

But wherever they’re located, the winemakers who make the most of the changing climate will have one thing in common: they won’t be those sticking exclusively with the famous European wine grapes that have, for centuries, dominated what we think of as fine wine chardonnay, pinot noir, riesling and others. Instead, they’ll take chances on a new generation of hybrid grapes, crossing old-school European varieties with hardier, indigenous North American grapes that can stand up better to Canada’s weather extremes. In doing so, they’ll create a truly terroir-driven, deeply Canadian wine industry, producing wine in parts of the country previously inhospitable to winemaking, and producing wines that’ll be more fully Canadian in character.

In part, that’s because indigenous grapes—such as vitis riparia, or, the “riverbank grape”, which is thought to be able to survive down to 57 below zero—can make it through even the harshest winters. And unlike European grapes brought over by settlers, they’re resistant to some local pests and a range of fungal diseases, like mildew and black rot. They have one major problem, however: these hardy native grapes don’t tend to ferment and age into great wines. This is where hybrids come in. 

Hobbyists and agricultural scientists have been trying to get the perfect cross between indigenous and European grapes since the 1850s, with very mixed results. Historically, wines made with hybrids have a well-deserved bad reputation. They’re less sophisticated, less enjoyable and often used to make industrially produced plonk. But over the past few years, new hybrid varieties have captured the imagination of more innovative winemakers. 

Toronto winemaker Drea Scotland, the founder of Drinks Farm in Ontario’s Prince Edward County, is getting people to taste wine made with the fruit growing around Georgian Bay: “Choosing fruit with genetics that are native to this place has to be a better expression of what local wine means and what local flavour is,” Scotland says. “And that lets us get beyond two established wine regions.” 

And it’s true: east of Prince Edward County, hybrids are already well-established. There are now roughly 25 wineries in eastern Ontario, far from the province’s more temperate Niagara region. Most are using hybrids, which are more disease-resistant than European varieties, requiring few or none of the potentially carcinogenic fungicides that most growers use. Sandor Johnson is the winemaker at Potter Settlement Artisan Wines in Tweed, Ontario, and he credits hybrids like Marquette and Frontenac with opening up new regions for award-winning viticulture. He also champions cold-resistant hybrids like Itasca (introduced in 2017, practically yesterday among grape varities) and Petite Pearl (released in 2009). The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides could be dramatically reduced, says Johnson, if more effort was put into picking the right grape varieties. 

Petite Pearl is used to make fresh, bright and fruity reds in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and in Nova Scotia. Frontenac and Marquette are both rising stars in Quebec’s buzzy wine industry, and essential to wineries in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick—under-the-radar locales that nonetheless offer some real gems. Itasca is the star grape at Mumana Vineyards, a new grower in Nova Scotia’s Avon Valley. It’s probably a good bet, given that East Coast winemakers aren’t snobbish about hybrids. Nova Scotia’s industry is best-known for L’Acadie grapes, a made-in-Canada hybrid critical to the Tidal Bay appellation, known for crunchy wines with citrus and stone fruit notes that are born to pair with seafood.  

These grapes are also becoming important in the heart of Canada’s two major wine regions. In the Okanagan, hybrids are part of the B.C.’s “Enhanced Replant Program,” a new initiative to help wineries affected by climate-change-driven disasters. The ERP will partially subsidize growers who are willing to rethink agricultural methods—including grape choices—to prepare for B.C.’s great post-Arctic blast replant.

Growers are being nudged to consider hybrids like fruity Frontenac, earthy Marquette and Chambourcin, known for its spicy notes. Some forward-thinking winemakers, such as the legendary Ann Sperling, who works in both the Okanagan and Niagara, have gained attention for working with Maréchal Foch, a divisive grape that contains indigenous riverbank grape DNA in addition to European ancestry. For a long time, it was associated with low-quality wines in Canada, thanks less to the quality of the grape and more to winemaking shortcuts, like adding sugar during fermentation. But in 2017, Sperling’s “Sperling Old Vines Foch” earned plaudits from some of the hardest-to-please wine critics in Canada. 

Sperling’s example, as well as that of other pioneers, point the way forward for the entire country. Hybrids represent a chance to build a stronger, better and more authentically Canadian wine industry that can handle climate extremes, and bring to drinkers new flavours and new terroirs. They represent a chance to stop trying to mimic styles made famous on another continent, and make unique wines that taste like those found nowhere else in the world.

Christine Sismondo is a Toronto-based award-winning writer, historian and author of America Walks into a Bar as well as Prohibition, a six-part podcast series.