Grape varieties

De Chaunac: the grape that lost its name

De Chaunac was once the most planted red in Ontario. It is still grown, still priced by the board, and still legal in VQA wine — but the regulation no longer allows its name on a label. Of the varieties on that list it is by far the most consequential: no other grape Ontario once planted at scale has been demoted out of its own name.

Table 3

Appendix B of Ontario Regulation 406/00 has three lists. Table 1 is the 90 Vitis vinifera varieties. Table 2 is the 29 hybrids that may be named on a label — Baco Noir, Vidal, Maréchal Foch and the rest. Table 3 is the short list that almost nobody reads: hybrids that may be used in VQA wine but may not be indicated on the label.

De Chaunac is on Table 3, alongside Aurore, Chelois, Léon Millot, Verdelet, Vignoles and a handful of numbered selections. A winery may put De Chaunac in a blend and sell it as VQA Ontario red; it may not put the word on the bottle. For a variety that was once the backbone of the province's red production, that is a remarkable demotion, and it is written into law.

What it was

De Chaunac is a French-American hybrid — Seibel 9549 — renamed in the 1970s for Adhémar de Chaunac, the Brights winery chemist who did as much as anyone to modernise Canadian winemaking. It is hardy, enormously productive and early-ripening, and in the decades when Ontario believed vinifera could not survive its winters, those three qualities made it the obvious red to plant. By the late 1970s it was among the most widely planted grapes in the province.

Its weakness was the wine. High yields diluted it, the acidity was aggressive, and the flavour carried the herbaceous, slightly foxy note that the market turned against once vinifera proved viable. The history page covers the 1988 Free Trade Agreement and the pull-out programme that followed; De Chaunac was among the varieties that programme was largely designed to remove, and a great deal of it came out.

What survived, and what it is paid

Enough remains to carry its own line in the schedule. The 2026 Grape Growers of Ontario price schedule gives De Chaunac class 5 to itself at $956 a tonne. That is the cheapest red in the schedule apart from the experimental hybrids at $932 — below Maréchal Foch at $1,131 and Chambourcin at $1,194, and roughly a third of what Syrah commands.

It does not appear in the top twenty by acreage in the Agri-Metrics study covering 2018 to 2022, so what is left is smaller than Seyval Blanc's nineteenth place. A board sets a price only for a grape that growers actually deliver, so the crop is real; it is simply small, and invisible in the reported statistics.

Where it goes

Into blends, and into wine sold outside the VQA system. A hybrid that cannot be named on a label has two remaining uses: as an anonymous component in a blended VQA red, where its colour and acid are useful and its name is irrelevant; or in non-VQA wine, which is a far larger market in Ontario than the VQA figures suggest. Total LCBO sales run to roughly $1.3 billion a year against about $112 million of VQA table wine, and a grape with no label value competes comfortably at the volume end of that.

The ripeness rule reflects the anonymity. Appendix A gives De Chaunac no line of its own, so it falls under "Other hybrid varieties" at 18.0° Brix, with no appellation tier — that tier applies to vinifera.

Why the name matters less than it looks

It is tempting to read Table 3 as a judgement on quality, and in part it is. But the more practical reading is about consumer information: the regulation is a labelling law, and its job is to decide which words on a bottle mean something reliable to a buyer. A variety whose Ontario reputation was built in the era the industry spent thirty years distancing itself from is not a word the regulation wants doing work on a label.

That is a defensible position and a slightly unfair one. The De Chaunac being grown now is not the over-cropped De Chaunac of 1978, and the growers who kept it know what it can do at restrained yields. But the name is not coming back, and nobody is planting a grape they cannot sell by name. The varieties page covers the three families and how the province arrived at its current mix.