The Eureka moment hit Drea Scotland while the winemaker was tending to two different grapes at a vineyard in Prince Edward County: one famous and one you’ve probably never heard of.
The famous grape, Chardonnay, is native to France but now grows from California to New Zealand and beyond — it is the most-planted white wine grape in the world. The Chardonnay growing in this particular Ontario field, however, was struggling.
At the same time, Scotland was also cultivating a grape called Geisenheim. Little known among the wine-drinking public, Geisenheim is a hybrid between a native North American grape species and a European one, and today is grown almost entirely in eastern Canada. Scotland’s Geisenheim was thriving.
“The Chardonnay was like a brown, crusty little shrub that needs to be coddled. And the Geisenheim is just doing it’s thing,” Scotland remembers. “It’s like night and day.”
The vast majority of bottles crowding the LCBO’s shelves are made from a few dozen grape varieties that, like Chardonnay, are native to Europe: their names, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Riesling, are as familiar as celebrities’.
In Ontario and across Canada, a growing number of winemakers are turning away from these in favour of lesser-known hybrid varieties with part North American parentage and scant name recognition: ones like L’Acadie Blanc, Frontenac Gris and Marquette. Others are using different fruits altogether, fermenting crabapples, cherries and blackcurrants, and throwing in herbs and flowers too.
Climate change is hastening this switch, as extreme temperatures and volatile weather make it harder to grow grapes already pushing the limits of their hardiness. In more climate-stricken parts of the country, vintners are considering replanting their devastated fields with lesser-known hybrids because they need vines that are likelier to survive — and keep their businesses alive along with them.
A taste for something new
But for some, climate resilience is just a bonus: the primary reason they are embracing new fermentations is because the resulting drinks are, to their palates and to a niche but healthy market, delicious and interesting. These winemakers want to create a completely distinct style of wine that better represents Ontario and its biodiversity, rather than copying wines born on another continent.
Whether the Kim Crawford crowd follows is less a matter of taste than of red tape, they complain. The province’s current regulations mean many of their novel, made-in-Ontario drinks are taxed more like imports, which acts not only as a brake on these businesses’ growth, but also throttles the pool of potential consumers who can try a sip and decide whether they like it.
The provincial agency that administers the VQA label, the Ontario Wine Appellation Authority, says it is updating its rules and regulations in response to feedback from the industry, and recognizes the planetary crisis looming over this debate.
“We are trying to be responsive to what grapes are being planted for the future, and climate change is part of the why. It’s implicit in everything that we do, because wine’s an agricultural product,” says Laurie Macdonald, executive director of the authority.
For Scotland and other winemakers, this moment is as exciting as it is uncertain: “We’re all trying to figure out what Ontario wine means,” she says.
B.C. feels the heat
The easiest way to observe the climate change’s threat to Canadian wine is to look west. In British Columbia, vintners have been pummelled by back-to-back environmental crises.
At Scout Vineyard in B.C.‘s Similkameen Valley, winemakers Aaron Godard and Murray Fonteyne primarily grew Riesling and Syrah, “varieties that up until the last couple of years were ideal for growing here, we would have said,” says Godard. Then, two winters ago, a brutal cold snap saw temperatures plummet to -27 C. The next winter dropped all the way to -30 C.
While the proprietors can’t say for sure what caused these extremes, community chatter has focused on climate change, especially as they’ve endured other episodes bearing the confirmed imprint of fossil fuel-driven warming. The 2021 heat dome that saw Lytton, B.C. notch Canada’s hottest recorded temperature one day before burning to the ground also resulted in a much smaller than normal grape harvest. Wildfires are now a seemingly annual threat and risk contaminating wines with what’s known as “smoke taint,” in addition to keeping away visitors, an important source of revenue.
Whatever the cause, the results were unambiguous: “I will probably end up pulling half of our acreage that’s dead,” says Fonteyne. They are still in the process of deciding what to replant — a long-term decision, since vines are supposed to produce grapes year after year.
Godard and Fonteyne say they will replant some of the more cold-tolerant “vinifera,” as the European grape varietals are collectively called. As for hybrids — crossbred plants designed to combine desirable traits from North American species’, like cold tolerance or disease resistance, with a European-leaning taste profile — the discussion is ongoing.
On the sustainability side, a major focus for Scout, the upsides are clear. Hybrids “allow for better farming,” says Godard. With vinifera, “there would be a lot more spraying and chemicals required to make it viable … that’s a shift we want to make no matter what. If we can have less inputs, that’s better for the environment, better for the farm, better for the soil, and ultimately better for the wines.”
But on the economic side, that conversation is complicated. Hybrid grapes “are not anything that a lot of consumers would know of … will consumers buy this wine? There’s a bit of an unknown.”
Ontario a tough climate
Ontario has so far been spared such dramatic impacts. But the province is “a very difficult environment to grow grapes,” says Jim Willwerth, a researcher at Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute. “If you can grow grapes in Ontario, you know, it’s kind of a joke that you can grow grapes anywhere.”
Freezing winters, torrential rains, hail, disease, pressure from the humid Great Lakes air — “that’s all normal,” says Willwerth. “But climate change will probably make things more extreme.”
Willwerth says there is no silver bullet. Hybrids provide flexibility. More varieties of vinifera might be able to survive here, and in more pockets of the province, as winters gradually warm. Wineries are already using technology like wind machines that circulate warm air down to the fields to protect against cold extremes.
“Farmers are always innovative. But we need to increase that rate of innovation,” Willwerth says.
Hybrids offer hope
For Scotland, the tale of the two vines had a simple moral.
“This is not France,” she says. Outside of Niagara, which has a unique microclimate, she says, “it’s like you’re busting your balls to keep these plants alive that don’t want to live.”
At Drinks Farm, her 1.5-acre vineyard in Prince Edward County, Scotland now grows Marquette, L’Acadie blanc, Frontenac Gris and Itasca, all hybrid varieties. One of her latest wines, which she calls Jarel, is a blend of half L’Acadie Blanc and half Petit Pearl, another hybrid. Scotland specifically chose these grapes because they would be more compatible with Ontario’s climate, she says, and in her opinion, a better expression of the province’s “terroir.”
Terroir, in its most philosophical sense, is the idea that a wine expresses the essence of a place because all the elements of the natural environment, from soil to climate to terrain, imbue the drink with its unique character.
Tariq Ahmed, who runs Revel Cider in Guelph, remembers learning about the term as an undergraduate in reference to a traditional single varietal wine like Pinot Noir.
“Bulls—-,” he recalls thinking.
How could one single species — grapes — possibly represent the rich natural diversity of an entire region? And how, especially, could it do so in Ontario, when that species of grape is imported from Europe?
Looking beyond the grape
At Revel, Ahmed ferments as many as 200 different drinks a year, using a huge variety of agricultural and wild produce. Soif, its bestseller, is a combination of a cherry and a strawberry cider, aged together along with a whack of Marechal Foch grape skins, a hybrid. In a nocino, a type of liqueur, he used black walnuts foraged from the banks of the Humber River.
“We really want to showcase all of the biodiversity in Ontario,” says Ahmed.
The cidery’s goal is to reflect the province’s abundance and seasonality. But being able to pivot between fruits, nuts, flowers and herbs also offers resilience as climate change subjects crops to extremes; an ill-timed frost can decimate an one season’s apple harvest, for example.
“It certainly has helped us a lot. When there’s a bad year for apples or grapes, we can shift one way or another,” says Ahmed. That’s easier for Revel, which customers know for its imaginative, blended ferments, than it would be for somewhere exclusively known for its Pinot Noir, he adds.
Hybrid wines, native grapes and “co-ferments,” as Revel’s approach is also known, are still unfamiliar to many. But they already have a large enough audience to support a wine festival in the U.S. known as “ABV Ferments,” short for “Anything But Vinifera.”
At Grape Witches, a natural wine store in Toronto, shoppers are receptive to these new products, says co-founder Nicole Campbell.
“It opens up the industry in this way that feels really exciting,” she says. While her clientele is already primed because they are shopping for natural wines — a term that describes products with less processing, preservatives and other interventions — she says the focus on sustainability meets an eager audience, including older generations.
“Nobody cares that it’s not Chardonnay,” she says.
The ABCs of the VQA
For Scotland, Ahmed and others, the biggest impediment to the growth of their Ontario-focused wines and ciders is the province’s own Byzantine tangle of rules and regulations about what counts as Ontario wine, and how it’s taxed.
The VQA label, Ontario’s wine appellation, indicates the wine has met certain standards laid out by the Ontario Wine Appellation Authority. One criteria is which grape varieties are used, a list that currently skews heavily European: there are over 80 approved vinifera, but only nine hybrids. (A slightly longer list of hybrids can be blended with vinifera, with even stricter labelling rules).
Getting a VQA label, says Scotland, “is the difference between being in business or not.” The province pockets a huge chunk of the sales price for non-VQA wines, with federal tax and deposits taking a cut too: a winery selling to a licensed store or restaurant, for example, would keep only 43 per cent of a bottle’s revenue, according to an online LCBO calculator.
Neither Scotland’s hybrid wine nor Ahmed’s ciders are eligible to receive VQA designation, because they are fermenting unapproved grapes and fruits. The economics of this mean that it’s tough to survive at all, and the best way to do so is to sell directly to consumers, a limited pool.
A full 20 per cent of Revel Cider’s sales, and its healthiest margins, also come from exports, an irony not lost on Ahmed.
“When you think about it like that, why are we even making cider in Ontario? We might as well make it somewhere else,” he says.
“It’s kind of a miracle that we’re able to exist here, and it’s only because I live here, essentially, and really stupidly wanted to do this thing.”
Macdonald, the executive director of the Ontario Wine Appellation Authority, notes that the agency isn’t responsible for taxes, markups and other financial policies, “the controversial piece,” she says. Those rules come from a different authority, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which reports to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry did not make anyone available for an interview for this story, instead emailing a list of programs that support small wineries and cideries.
She notes that a handful of hybrid grapes have been added to the list in recent years, and a longer list is currently up for consideration.
“The grape variety is an ongoing issue and we’re trying to stay ahead of it rather than be constantly trying to catch up,” she says. “That was the impetus to put a big list out there for consultation.” (Adding the grapes ultimately requires the Minister to change legislation, she notes, which typically takes about six months, “pretty fast compared to other regulations.”)
She encouraged winemakers to “engage in our regulatory change process,” she says. “We want to be inclusive.”
Ultimately, Ahmed would like to see not only more drinkers taking notice of this style, but more wine and cider makers.
“If Ontario was known for that, that would certainly put it on the map, the same way France has put themselves on the map for Burgundy.”
