Grape varieties

The other Ontario table grapes: Fredonia, Himrod and the rest

After Sovereign Coronation takes its 297 acres, about 45 acres of Ontario table grapes remain, split across five named varieties and a research block. None of them supports a page of its own, and together they say something useful about the industry.

The whole list

From the Ontario Fresh Grape Growers' GPS-mapped production table for 2019, excluding Sovereign Coronation:

• Fredonia — 33.79 acres, all of it outside Niagara-on-the-Lake
• Himrod — 2.93 acres
• Patricia — 2.87 acres
• Van Buren — 1.02 acres
• Suffolk Red — 0.59 acres
• Experimental labrusca (fresh) — 3.87 acres

The total is 45.07 acres against a provincial fresh-grape total of 342.18. Put another way, every Ontario table grape that is not Sovereign Coronation, added together, is about one seventh of the industry — and three quarters of that is Fredonia.

Fredonia, the real second variety

Fredonia is a blue labrusca released in 1927 at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, bred from Champion crossed with Lucile. It ripens earlier than Concord, which is its point: it extends the season at the front end, and in a province where the selling window is a few weeks that matters more than it sounds.

It is the only one of these varieties that also appears in the wine-grape economy. The 2026 Grape Growers of Ontario price schedule lists class 1 as "Concord, Fredonia" at $662 a tonne, so fruit diverted from the fresh market has a processing outlet at the same price as Concord. The acreage table shows all 33.79 acres in District 2 — the whole of Ontario outside Niagara-on-the-Lake — which distinguishes it from Sovereign Coronation, five sixths of which sits inside that one town.

The seedless ones, and why there are so few

Himrod, at 2.93 acres, is the province's seedless white: a Cornell release from 1952, crossed from Ontario and Thompson Seedless, with a honeyed flavour and a well-known weakness — the clusters are straggly and the berries drop readily once ripe, which makes it a difficult grape to pack and ship. Suffolk Red, at 0.59 acres, is a red seedless from the same breeding tradition with much the same handling problem.

Between them they are three and a half acres, and that is the honest summary of Ontario's seedless table-grape industry. The varieties exist, growers have tried them, and they have not scaled. Patricia and Van Buren, both blue labrusca-type grapes with seeds, occupy another four acres between them.

Why none of these is the next Sovereign Coronation

Look down the list and a pattern emerges: every one of these varieties is older than the grape that dominates the industry. Fredonia dates from 1927, Van Buren from 1935, Himrod from 1952, Suffolk Red from 1972; Sovereign Coronation was released in 1973 and beat all of them.

That is not a coincidence. Sovereign Coronation was bred in Canada, for Canadian conditions, at a federal station in British Columbia, with a short season and winter survival as explicit design goals. The others were bred in New York State for a milder climate and a longer autumn, and they were adopted here because they were the best available rather than because they fitted. An industry whose second-largest variety is a 1927 New York release is one that has been waiting a long time for another purpose-built option.

What the tail is for

Almost none of this fruit reaches a supermarket. At these acreages a variety is a farm-gate proposition — a pick-your-own operation, a roadside stand, a few rows a grower keeps because regular customers ask for them by name. The 3.87 acres of experimental labrusca is the industry looking for its next variety, which the 2019 report describes explicitly: the goal is to find grapes that complement Sovereign Coronation and grow the whole category rather than replace the one that already works.

That search is the most interesting thing about this list. An industry of 342 acres with 87 per cent in a single variety bred in 1973 is not diversified, and the growers know it. The table grapes page covers why the crop stays small, and the varieties page sets the fresh grapes against the wine and juice crops.

Figures are 2019, the most recent Ontario Fresh Grape Growers edition published, and cover GPS-mapped acreage, which the report estimates at about 70 per cent of total production. The proportions are more reliable than the absolute totals.