About

About Ontario Grapes

A reference site on grape growing in Ontario, written from scratch in 2026 on a domain that carried a growers' forum from 2000 to about 2008.

What was here before

From 2000 until roughly 2008, ontariograpes.com was the home page of the Viticultural Roundtable of Southwestern Ontario. The roundtable described itself as an informal forum for discussion and the sharing of expertise among grape growers in the southwestern corner of the province, the part of Ontario that holds the Lake Erie North Shore and Pelee Island appellations. The site was small and practical. It listed the roundtable's variety trials and monitoring programmes, a calendar of grower meetings, a page on icewine, a page of local statistics and a list of links and resources, all inside a frameset of the kind that was normal for a volunteer site of that era.

The roundtable's work was later carried on by the regional bodies that grew up around it. The Southwestern Ontario Vintners Association, founded in 1993, became EPIC Wineries in 2012, and the province-wide organisations, Grape Growers of Ontario and what is now Wine Growers Ontario, took over most of the technical and statistical publishing that a volunteer forum once did by hand. The site went dark, the domain lapsed, and it sat parked for more than a decade.

What it is now

The current site is not a restoration of the old pages. Those were the roundtable's words and they belong to the people who wrote them. What has been kept is the subject and the structure: a page for each thing the old site tried to explain, written fresh, at the depth a reader in 2026 expects. Where an old address still receives visitors, it is redirected to the page that now covers the same ground, so a twenty-year-old link to the icewine page still lands on a page about icewine.

The scope is viticulture rather than wine criticism. This site is about how grapes are grown in Ontario: where, which varieties, under what climate, with what history and in what quantities. It does not review wines, rank wineries or recommend where to buy anything.

How the pages are written and checked

Every figure on this site is rounded, dated and traceable. Acreage, grower counts and crop tonnage change every year, and a single-year number quoted without a date is the most common way writing about Ontario grapes goes wrong. Where the site gives a number it says roughly when it was true and points to the body that publishes the current one, usually Grape Growers of Ontario's annual report or VQA Ontario's vintage reports. The statistics page explains how those sources differ and why their totals rarely match each other.

Appellation boundaries, sub-appellation names and icewine production rules are taken from the published VQA Ontario regulations rather than from memory or from winery marketing. Climate figures are stated as ranges, because a vineyard on the Beamsville Bench and one on Pelee Island do not share a growing season and pretending they do helps nobody.

The site names wineries and growers only where they are part of the documented history of the region, and it does not make claims about the quality of anyone's wine or the conduct of anyone's business. If something here is wrong, it will be corrected, and the correction will be visible.

Independence

Ontario Grapes is not affiliated with Grape Growers of Ontario, VQA Ontario, the Ontario Wine Appellation Authority, Wine Growers Ontario, EPIC Wineries, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness (OMAFA), or any winery, nursery or vineyard. It takes no money from any of them. Links to those organisations are given because they are the authoritative sources, and they are listed together on the resources page.

Where the site carries links to commercial sites, they are marked as such, and they do not influence what the pages say.

Contact

Corrections and additions are welcome, particularly from growers whose experience of a region or a variety differs from what is written here. That was the point of the roundtable that used to live at this address, and it is a reasonable standard for what replaced it.