Grape varieties

Auxerrois: priced as a serious grape, sold as almost nothing

Ontario pays $1,674 a tonne for Auxerrois, more than it pays for Riesling. It does not reach the province's published top twenty by acreage — a reporting threshold rather than a measurement of how little is planted — and it is close to invisible on a wine list. It is the clearest case in the schedule of a grape the industry values and the market has never met.

Not Pinot Blanc, though it has been sold as it

Auxerrois is a white variety from Alsace and Lorraine, a sibling of Chardonnay in the sense that both descend from a Pinot crossed with Gouais Blanc. For most of the twentieth century it was routinely confused with, blended into and labelled as Pinot Blanc, in Alsace and elsewhere, and a good deal of what was planted around the world as one turned out on inspection to be the other. The VQA regulation lists it in Table 1 as its own Vitis vinifera variety, with "Pinot Auxerrois" recorded as an accepted synonym — which preserves the historical association while keeping the two grapes distinct.

What it is paid, and what that implies

The 2026 Grape Growers of Ontario price schedule puts Auxerrois in class 9a at $1,674 a tonne, grouped with Kerner and Scheurebe. That is above Riesling's $1,468 plateau price and not far below the $1,868 paid for J. Riesling, and it sits in the vinifera band rather than the hybrid one. A board does not set a price in that range for a grape nobody is delivering; the price implies a real, if small, commercial crop, contracted by wineries that want it.

What there is no evidence of is scale. Auxerrois does not appear in the top twenty by acreage in the Agri-Metrics study covering 2018 to 2022 — a list that reaches down to Chardonnay Musqué and Geisenheim hybrids — so its plantings are smaller than those. Nor does it register in the LCBO's VQA varietal sales table, where the reported varieties stop well above it.

The ripeness rule for an unlisted variety

Appendix A of the regulation gives its own Brix line to about twenty named varieties. Auxerrois is not among them, so it falls under "Other vitis vinifera varieties" at a minimum average of 17.0° Brix for the provincial designation and 18.0° for a wine claiming a viticultural area. Those are the lowest figures in the appendix, shared with Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc, and in practice they are generous for this grape: Auxerrois ripens early and accumulates sugar readily, and its difficulty in a warm year is holding acid rather than reaching ripeness.

Why it suits Ontario better than its acreage suggests

On paper Auxerrois is well matched to the province. It buds late, which keeps it clear of the spring frosts that trouble Chardonnay; it ripens early, which suits a short season; and it is reasonably hardy for a vinifera. A grower looking for a white that tolerates a cooler site without resorting to a hybrid has a genuine candidate here.

What it lacks is a market. Auxerrois makes a soft, low-acid, faintly floral wine with no strong identity of its own, which is why its historical role almost everywhere has been as a blending component rather than a named bottling — it fleshes out leaner wines. A variety that is mostly useful inside a blend is difficult to sell a consumer on, and difficult for a grower to plant speculatively without a contract. That, rather than any failing in the vineyard, is the ceiling.

Where it is grown

Auxerrois in Ontario is a Niagara grape in small blocks, generally planted by wineries with a specific blend or a specific Alsatian-styled bottling in mind rather than sold on the open grape market. It is the kind of planting that does not show up in provincial statistics and does show up in a winery's own range. The varieties page places it among the province's whites, and the resources page lists where the official plantings and pricing data are published.

Because Auxerrois falls below the reporting threshold in both the acreage study and the VQA sales table, the figures on this page describe what is known about it — its price class and its regulatory status — rather than its scale, which is not published.