Grape varieties

Marquette: the fastest-growing grape in Ontario

Across 2018 to 2022, Marquette acreage grew at about 11.7 per cent a year — more than four times the rate of any vinifera in the province. It is a University of Minnesota cold-hardy hybrid, released in 2006, and it is the clearest sign of where Ontario planting is heading outside the appellations.

A new variety, growing from a small base

The Agri-Metrics varietal study ranks Marquette fourteenth in Ontario by acreage over that period, with an average annual increase of 11.7 per cent. Only GR 7, at 12.1 per cent, was growing faster. For comparison, the strongest-growing vinifera in the top ten was Cabernet Franc at 2.1 per cent, and most of the province's established varieties were shrinking.

Rates like that come from a low base, and the caution matters: eleven per cent of a small number is still a small number, and fourteenth place in a table where the top ten hold roughly 80 per cent of the acreage is a modest position. But the direction is unambiguous, and it is the direction of a variety being planted deliberately rather than one being maintained.

What it is

Marquette was developed at the University of Minnesota and released in 2006, a complex hybrid with Vitis riparia in its background and, more distantly, Pinot Noir. It was bred for one purpose: to survive winters that kill Vitis vinifera outright while making a red wine with structure rather than the foxy character of the old labrusca crosses. It is very cold-hardy, ripens early, resists downy and powdery mildew well, and accumulates sugar readily while holding high acidity.

It appears in Table 2 of the VQA regulation — the hybrids that may be named on a label — having been added after the province approved it, and it is one of the varieties Brock's VineAlert programme now samples for bud hardiness alongside the vinifera.

The highest ripeness bar in the appendix

Appendix A sets varietal Marquette at a minimum average of 19.5° Brix, the highest provincial figure in the whole table, shared with Baco Noir and the Frontenac family. Like every hybrid it has no separate appellation tier.

The figure reflects the grape rather than an aspiration: Marquette reaches high sugar easily and retains aggressive acidity, so a low bar would permit a thin, sharp wine. The rule pushes it to the ripeness at which the tannin and fruit arrive and the acid comes into balance — which is the same reasoning the regulation applies to Baco Noir, its closest commercial analogue.

Priced with Baco Noir

The 2026 price schedule lists class 5b as "Baco Noir, Marquette" at $1,281 a tonne. The pairing is apt: both are very hardy reds carrying the highest ripeness requirement in the appendix, and both are grown where vinifera cannot be risked. The difference is that Baco Noir arrived a century ago and has the best-selling red varietal wine in the province, while Marquette arrived in 2006 and has no separate line in the sales table at all.

The Minnesota programme behind it

Marquette did not appear in isolation. It came out of the University of Minnesota's cold-hardy grape breeding programme, which has released a series of varieties aimed at climates where vinifera cannot be grown at all — Frontenac and its colour mutations, La Crescent, Itasca and others. Several are now authorised in Ontario: Table 2 of the regulation lists Marquette, Itasca and the three Frontenacs among the hybrids that may be named on a label, and the price schedule carries Frontenac in class 5c and Frontenac Blanc and Gris in class 7c.

That is a meaningful shift. For most of the twentieth century Ontario's hybrid options were French crosses bred in the 1900s to 1930s for European conditions. The varieties now being planted on the province's cold ground were bred in the last thirty years, in North America, explicitly for winters like these — and the regulation has been amended to admit them as they arrive.

Why it is being planted

Marquette answers a question the province's established varieties do not. A grower on cold ground — outside the designated viticultural areas, or in a part of Ontario where vinifera has never been viable — has historically had a choice between the old hybrids and nothing. Marquette offers genuine winter hardiness with a wine profile closer to a conventional dry red, which opens vineyard land that was not previously worth planting.

That is why its growth shows up in a provincial table while its sales do not: much of the planting is outside the appellation system and outside the LCBO's VQA channel, in small wineries serving local markets. The regions page explains what the designated areas cover and what they leave out, and the varieties page covers the three families of grape the province grows.