Grape varieties

Pinot Gris: eighth in the vineyard, first on the shelf

Ontario plants less Pinot Gris than it plants Vidal, Chardonnay, Riesling, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon. It sells more of it than any other varietal wine the province makes. Almost everything interesting about the grape here lives in that inversion.

The gap between planted and sold

In the Agri-Metrics varietal study covering 2018 to 2022, Pinot Gris ranks eighth in Ontario by acreage, and its plantings were essentially flat — up about 0.3 per cent a year in a vineyard that was slightly contracting. In 2023, LCBO VQA table wine sales of Pinot Gris came to roughly $15.2 million, about 13 per cent of the category and the single largest varietal figure in it, narrowly ahead of Riesling.

Two things follow. The first is that Pinot Gris converts almost entirely into table wine sold in Ontario, unlike Vidal, which dominates the acreage table and barely appears in the sales one because its crop goes to icewine. The second is that demand is running ahead of supply, and the price reflects it: the 2026 GGO schedule puts Pinot Gris in class 9d at $2,522 a tonne, the highest price paid for any white grape in the province and more than triple what Vidal earns.

Why the acreage has not chased the price

A grape that sells well and pays well might be expected to be planted hard. Ontario's has not been, and the reasons are agricultural rather than commercial. Pinot Gris is a colour mutation of Pinot Noir and inherits its habits: compact clusters that are vulnerable to bunch rot in a wet autumn, thin skins, and a tendency to lose acidity quickly once ripening starts, which narrows the picking window. It is also only moderately winter-hardy, so it does not solve any of the problems a grower on a marginal site is trying to solve. Replanting a good vinifera block to Pinot Gris is a straightforward decision; putting it on cold ground is not.

The narrow picking window is the constraint growers talk about most. Picked late, the wine turns broad and flat; picked early, it is thin. The vine year page covers veraison and the harvest decision in general terms.

The ripeness bar, and what it permits

Appendix A of Ontario Regulation 406/00 sets varietal Pinot Gris — listed as "Pinot Gris / Grigio" — at a minimum average of 17.5° Brix provincially and 18.5° for an appellation wine. That is a low bar by the table's standards, half a degree under Chardonnay at the provincial tier and a degree and a half under it at the appellation tier, and it accommodates the early picking the variety's acid curve demands.

The regulation also permits both names. "Pinot Gris" and "Pinot Grigio" are the same grape under the rules, and the choice between them on a label is a stylistic signal rather than a legal one — broadly, the Italian name for the lighter, crisper style and the French for the fuller one. Nothing in the regulation enforces that distinction.

Priced with a variety almost nobody plants

Class 9d contains two varieties: Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc. They are paid identically at $2,522 a tonne, which is a curiosity, because one of them is the province's best-selling white and the other does not appear in the top twenty by acreage at all. Price classes group grapes by their production economics rather than their market, and this is the clearest case in the schedule of that logic producing an odd-looking result.

The other uses of the crop

Not all of it becomes a varietal white. Pinot Gris has pink-skinned berries, and extended skin contact produces the copper-tinged style sold elsewhere as ramato; a small amount of Ontario fruit goes that way. More of it goes into white blends, where its weight is useful, and some into traditional-method sparkling base wine. White blends accounted for roughly $5.4 million of VQA table wine sales in 2023, and none of the varieties inside them appear in a varietal sales table — so the $15.2 million figure for Pinot Gris understates rather than overstates how much of the province's crop it represents.

Where it grows

Pinot Gris is planted across the Niagara Peninsula, with a concentration on the warmer plain around Niagara-on-the-Lake and Four Mile Creek rather than the coolest bench sites, and on the Lake Erie North Shore, where the longer season suits it. It is grown in Prince Edward County as well, where, like the other vinifera there, it is buried each autumn. The regions page covers the appellations; the varieties page places Pinot Gris among the whites the province grows.