Grape varieties

Concord: the grape Ontario's wine rules do not mention

Concord is not in the VQA regulation. Not in the vinifera table, not among the nameable hybrids, not even on the list of hybrids that may be used but not named. It is the grape Ontario grew for a century, and the wine law is silent about it.

Outside the regulation entirely

Appendix B of Ontario Regulation 406/00 authorises 90 Vitis vinifera varieties, 29 nameable hybrids and 14 hybrids usable but not nameable. Concord appears on none of them, and neither does Niagara. That is not an oversight: VQA is a wine-appellation system, and Vitis labrusca is not a wine grape in its terms. The regulation has nothing to say about a grape that is not going to become approved wine.

What that means practically is that Concord sits outside the entire apparatus this site spends most of its time describing. No minimum Brix applies to it, because Appendix A only sets ripeness for varieties that can make VQA wine. No appellation tier applies. It cannot carry a sub-appellation, because it cannot carry the designation at all.

What it is instead

Concord is a juice grape, and in Ontario that is a real industry rather than a remnant. It is the grape behind grape juice, jelly and the sweet labrusca wines that predate the modern industry, and it is the flavour most North Americans mean when they say a thing tastes of grape — the methyl anthranilate note usually called foxy, which is a compliment in juice and a defect in wine.

Agriculturally it is close to indestructible by Ontario standards: extremely winter-hardy, disease-tolerant, heavy-cropping and reliable. It is the grape a grower plants when the question is yield per acre rather than quality per bottle, and it will survive winters that kill every vinifera in this province. The climate page explains what those winters actually do.

Near the floor of the schedule

The 2026 Grape Growers of Ontario price schedule puts Concord in class 1 at $662 a tonne, paired with Fredonia. Class 2, Niagara and Wiley White, is the same $662. Only one grape class is cheaper — class 7c, the cold-hardy white hybrids including Frontenac Blanc, Frontenac Gris, l'Acadie Blanc and Traminette, at $637 — so the labrusca juice grapes sit just above the floor rather than on it. For comparison, Syrah is $2,982 and Pinot Gris $2,522 — roughly four times the money for fruit from the same province.

That gap is the whole economic argument of the modern Ontario vineyard, and it is why the 1988 pull-out happened. But the comparison is less lopsided than it looks: Concord crops far more heavily per acre than any vinifera, needs a fraction of the spray programme, and does not have to be replanted after a bad winter. Revenue per acre and revenue per tonne are different questions.

The grower fee tells you something

A small detail in the schedule is worth noticing. Board fees for Concord are $10.00 a tonne, with no grading fee and no research levy. Every hybrid and vinifera class carries a $2.05 research and development fee, and the vinifera whites add a grading fee on top. The industry's research money is raised from the grapes the industry is trying to improve; the juice grapes are left alone.

The Ontario connection people get wrong

Concord is frequently described as an Ontario grape. It is not: it was raised in 1849 at Concord, Massachusetts, by Ephraim Wales Bull, from a wild Vitis labrusca seedling. What is true is that Ontario adopted it almost completely. For roughly a century it was the province's default planting, and the industry that grew up around it — the wineries, the tariff protection, the sweet labrusca styles — is the industry the 1988 Free Trade Agreement dismantled.

That history is why Concord occupies an odd place in Ontario's self-description. It is simultaneously the grape that built the industry and the grape the industry defined itself against, and both accounts are fair.

Where it is grown

Concord acreage is concentrated on the Lake Erie North Shore and in the older parts of the Niagara Peninsula, often on sites that were never converted during the replanting because the economics did not justify it, or because the grower had a juice contract worth keeping. It is a smaller share of the province than it was, and a stable one. The varieties page puts the three families side by side, and the statistics page explains why provincial figures that mix juice and wine grapes have to be read carefully.