Grape varieties

Niagara: the white labrusca, and a name that confuses everyone

Ontario has a grape called Niagara and a wine region called Niagara, and they have almost nothing to do with each other. The grape is a white juice labrusca that the VQA regulation does not recognise; the region is where most of the province's vinifera grows.

The name collision

The Niagara grape was bred in 1868 at Lockport, New York, from Concord crossed with Cassady, and it took its name from Niagara County. Ontario's Niagara Peninsula takes its name from the same river. The two usages have coexisted ever since, and they cause a particular confusion here that they do not cause elsewhere: a wine labelled Niagara Peninsula is almost certainly made from vinifera, and has nothing to do with the Niagara grape.

The regulation keeps them firmly apart, though not deliberately. "Niagara Peninsula", "Niagara Escarpment", "Niagara-on-the-Lake", "Niagara River" and "Niagara Lakeshore" are all protected viticultural terms under Ontario Regulation 406/00. The Niagara grape appears nowhere in the regulation at all — not in the vinifera table, not among the nameable hybrids, not on the list of hybrids usable but unnameable. Like Concord, it falls outside the VQA system entirely, because Vitis labrusca is not a VQA wine grape.

What it actually is

Niagara is, in effect, white Concord: the same species, the same foxy aromatic character, the same hardiness and productivity, with green-gold berries instead of blue-black. It is grown for juice, for jelly and for the sweet labrusca wines that preceded the modern industry, and it carries the same unmistakable grape-candy note that makes it excellent juice and, by contemporary taste, poor dry wine.

In the vineyard it behaves like its parent. It is very winter-hardy, tolerant of the fungal pressure that troubles vinifera in a wet Ontario summer, and heavy-cropping. It is one of the few grapes in the province a grower can plant without thinking hard about site selection, which is precisely why the province planted so much of it for so long.

Priced at the floor

The 2026 price schedule gives Niagara class 2, paired with Wiley White, at $662 a tonne — the same figure as Concord in class 1, and within $25 of the cheapest grape class in the schedule — class 7c, the cold-hardy white hybrids, at $637. Board fees are $10.00 a tonne with no grading fee and no research levy, the same treatment the other juice grapes get.

Wiley White, its class partner, is an even older labrusca selection and a genuine rarity; the pairing is a species grouping rather than a commercial one. Neither variety appears in the top twenty by acreage in the Agri-Metrics study covering 2018 to 2022, so the white juice crop is smaller than the blue one.

A parent, not a sibling

The relationship to Concord is closer than "both labrusca" suggests: Niagara is Concord's offspring, bred in 1868 from Concord crossed with Cassady. Nearly everything distinctive about it — the hardiness, the productivity, the aromatic foxy character, the tolerance of a wet summer — comes down that line.

The practical consequence for a grower is that the two varieties want the same sites and the same management, and the choice between them is a question of which processor contract is available rather than which grape suits the ground. That is unusual in this province, where site selection normally does most of the work in deciding what gets planted.

Why the juice grapes persist

A grape paid a quarter of what Pinot Gris earns looks like a variety on the way out, and the labrusca share of the Ontario vineyard has indeed fallen a long way since the 1988 pull-out. But the remaining acreage is not a relic waiting to be replanted. It is contracted to juice processors, it sits on ground where vinifera would be a gamble, it costs far less to farm, and it crops heavily enough that revenue per acre is a different calculation from revenue per tonne.

It is also, unlike the wine crop, largely insulated from fashion. Nobody's juice preferences turned against labrusca the way the wine market did. The varieties page covers the three families, and the statistics page explains why a provincial tonnage figure that mixes juice and wine grapes needs reading with care.