OntarioGrapesResources
Sources and further reading on Ontario viticulture
The organisations that publish the authoritative numbers, rules and research behind everything on this site. If a figure here and a figure there disagree, trust theirs and tell us.
Growers' and industry bodies
Grape Growers of Ontario
The marketing board for the province's grape growers since 1947. Publishes the annual report with acreage, tonnage, grower numbers and the negotiated grape prices by variety. The primary source for anything on our statistics page.
VQA Ontario
The Ontario Wine Appellation Authority. Defines the appellations and sub-appellations, the rules for icewine and the annual vintage reports. The source for every boundary and rule on the regions and icewine pages.
Wine Growers Ontario
The wineries' trade association, formerly the Wine Council of Ontario and then the Winery and Grower Alliance. Publishes crop and economic-impact summaries from the winery side.
Wine Country Ontario
The consumer-facing arm: winery listings, regional maps and visitor information. Useful for finding who is planted where, less so for numbers.
Regional associations
Each growing region has its own body, and for the region this site began in that body has changed name twice. The Southwestern Ontario Vintners Association was founded in 1993 and became EPIC Wineries, for Essex Pelee Island Coast, in 2012. Niagara's wineries and growers are organised through several sub-regional groups as well as the provincial bodies, and Prince Edward County has the Prince Edward County Winegrowers Association. Their websites are the best place to find current member lists and event calendars, which is roughly what the old calendar page on this site used to do for the southwest.
Government and research
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness (OMAFA)
Publishes the grape sections of the provincial crop protection guides, integrated pest management notes and the winter-injury advisories that growers actually use. Look for the fruit crop pages and the tender fruit and grape specialists' newsletters.
Vineland Research and Innovation Centre
The horticultural research station in Vineland, Niagara, on the site of the historic Ontario Horticultural Experiment Station. Grape and tender fruit breeding, rootstock trials and climate work.
Brock University, Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute
CCOVI, in St. Catharines. Research on cold-hardiness, bud survival monitoring through the winter, and the VineAlert programme that tells growers how much frost their buds can still take.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Harrow
The federal research station in Essex County, historically a source of variety and rootstock evaluation for the Lake Erie North Shore, and the closest research presence to where the original roundtable met.
How to read the numbers you find
Three warnings, learned the hard way. First, Grape Growers of Ontario counts grapes sold through the marketing board, so its tonnage excludes fruit that wineries grow themselves and never sell; the crop is larger than the board's tonnage. Second, acreage figures move slowly and are often repeated for years after the survey that produced them; check the date. Third, "Ontario wine" and "VQA Ontario wine" are not the same thing, because a great deal of wine bottled in Ontario is made from imported grapes and juice under the blended category, and statistics about one are routinely quoted as if they were about the other. The statistics page works through each of these.
Historical reading
For the pre-VQA story, the best starting points are the histories published by the regional bodies themselves and the museum collections in Niagara and on Pelee Island, where the ruins of the 1866 Vin Villa winery still stand. Our own history page follows the thread from Pelee Island to the 1988 pull-out and the vinifera industry that came out of it.