Grape varieties

Pinot Noir: the second most expensive grape in the province

Ontario pays $2,795 a tonne for Pinot Noir, more than for any grape except Syrah. It is thin-skinned, rot-prone, tender in winter and temperamental in a wet harvest, and the province keeps planting it anyway — increasingly for wine with bubbles in it.

Priced near the top

The 2026 Grape Growers of Ontario schedule gives Pinot Noir a class of its own, 10a, at $2,795 a tonne. Only Syrah at $2,982 is higher; Merlot is $2,614 and Cabernet Franc $2,308.

The price is not a reflection of yield — Pinot Noir crops lightly, which is part of why the fruit costs what it does — nor of easy sales. LCBO VQA table wine sales in 2023 came to about $4.7 million, roughly four per cent of the category, behind Baco Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. What it reflects is a grape that is expensive to grow properly and that wineries want for reasons beyond the still red it makes.

The sparkling argument

A growing share of Ontario Pinot Noir never becomes red wine. It goes into traditional-method sparkling wine, usually blended with Chardonnay, and that category has done more to justify the variety's presence here than its still wines have.

The logic is the reverse of the usual problem. For still Pinot Noir, Ontario's cool season and uncertain autumn are obstacles: the fruit struggles to reach ripeness with structure intact. For sparkling base wine, picking early at moderate sugar with high natural acidity is precisely the brief. A site that produces a marginal still Pinot Noir can produce an excellent sparkling one, and under the regulation grapes with a sparkling end use are paid at the varietal base price — so the grower is not penalised for the choice. Clone selection has followed: the sparkling selections of both Pinot Noir and Chardonnay have spread with the category.

What makes it difficult

Pinot Noir's clusters are compact and its skins thin, which is a poor combination in a wet September: bunch rot moves through a tight cluster quickly and there is little skin to resist it. It is moderately tender in winter, less hardy than Cabernet Franc and Riesling. It is also famously sensitive to site and to clone, so two blocks a few hundred metres apart can produce materially different wine.

Brock's VineAlert programme tracks bud hardiness by variety and sub-appellation through each dormant season, and Pinot Noir is among the varieties it samples. The climate page covers what those figures mean in practice and why they move so much between January and a March thaw.

Where it belongs

Pinot Noir suits the cooler sites rather than the warmest, which makes it one of the few reds in the province whose map is not simply "the warm ground". It is planted on the Niagara benches — the Beamsville and Twenty Mile benches in particular — and it is a specialty of Prince Edward County, where the limestone soils suit it and the vines are buried every autumn to survive the winter at all. It is grown on the Lake Erie North Shore too, though the warmer season there tends to be given to varieties that need it more.

By acreage it ranks sixth in the province and was close to flat across 2018 to 2022, drifting down about 0.3 per cent a year. The regions page covers the appellations and the sub-appellations it favours.

Rosé and blanc de noirs

A third use absorbs fruit that suits neither still red nor sparkling: rosé. The rosé blend category was worth about $6.6 million in VQA table wine sales in 2023, more than varietal Pinot Noir itself, and Pinot Noir is a natural component. The regulation accommodates this directly — under Appendix A, rose and blanc de noirs wines carrying a viticultural area need each component variety to meet only the lower provincial minimum rather than the appellation figure, provided the label declares Rosé or Blanc de Noirs. For a thin-skinned variety in a wet autumn, being able to pick early and declassify into rosé without losing the appellation is a genuinely useful escape route.

A middling ripeness bar

Appendix A of Ontario Regulation 406/00 sets varietal Pinot Noir at 18.5° Brix provincially and 19.5° for an appellation wine — half a degree above Cabernet Franc and Syrah at the provincial tier, and a full degree below Merlot's 20.5° at the appellation tier. It is a moderate requirement for a grape that rarely has trouble reaching sugar here; Pinot Noir's difficulty in Ontario is almost never ripeness, and almost always what the weather did in the fortnight before picking.