OntarioGrapesStatistics
Ontario grape statistics, and how to read them
How large the Ontario grape crop is, who measures it, why the published totals disagree with one another, and the three mistakes that most writing about the numbers makes.
The headline figures
Ontario has on the order of five hundred grape growers farming somewhat more than seventeen thousand acres of vineyard, roughly seven thousand hectares. Around nine tenths of that acreage is in the Niagara Peninsula, with the Lake Erie North Shore and Prince Edward County sharing most of the remainder and a small fraction scattered elsewhere in the province. Roughly two thirds of the acreage is Vitis vinifera, and the largest single varieties by area are Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Vidal, Merlot and Pinot Noir, though the order among them shifts with each planting survey.
The crop sold to wineries in a normal year is in the tens of thousands of tonnes, with a farm-gate value in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. Those figures are deliberately given as ranges, because the crop is unusually variable: a hard winter can remove a third of the buds across a region, and a wet harvest can downgrade a large share of what remains. A single year's tonnage quoted without the year attached is close to meaningless, and the page you are reading will not do it. The current figures are in the sources below and are updated annually.
Who publishes what
Grape Growers of Ontario
The growers' marketing board. Its annual report is the primary source for acreage by variety and region, number of growers, tonnage sold through the board, and the negotiated minimum price per tonne for each variety and grade. Published each year after the harvest is settled.
VQA Ontario
The appellation authority. Publishes vintage reports describing the season and the crop from the quality side, and statistics on the volume of wine approved under the VQA standard by appellation and category.
Wine Growers Ontario
The wineries' association. Publishes economic-impact studies and crop summaries from the processing side, including estimates for grapes wineries grow themselves.
Statistics Canada and OMAFA
The federal statistics agency's fruit surveys and the provincial ministry's crop statistics carry grape acreage and production figures compiled on a different basis, useful for long series and for comparison with other provinces.
Why the totals disagree
Anyone who compares two of those sources will find that their figures for the same year do not match, and the reason is that they are counting different things.
Grapes sold versus grapes grown. Grape Growers of Ontario's tonnage is the quantity sold by independent growers to processors through the board. It excludes fruit that wineries grow on their own land and process themselves, which is a substantial and growing share. The total Ontario crop is therefore larger than the board's tonnage, and the wineries' association estimate, which tries to include estate fruit, is larger again.
Bearing versus planted acreage. A vine takes three or four years from planting to first meaningful crop. Acreage surveys may report total planted area or bearing area, and the difference can be several hundred acres in a period of active planting.
Calendar year versus crop year. The harvest runs from September into October, and icewine grapes are picked in December or January. Some series assign the icewine crop to the calendar year it was picked in and others to the vintage it belongs to.
Survey year. Acreage figures are produced by periodic surveys and are often repeated unchanged for several years afterwards. A figure that appears in three consecutive annual reports may be one measurement, not three.
Three mistakes to avoid
Ontario wine is not VQA wine. A large share of the wine bottled in Ontario is made wholly or partly from imported grapes, juice or wine under the blended category. Statistics about the sales, revenue or market share of "Ontario wine" often include that category, while statistics about the grape crop obviously do not. Comparing one to the other produces nonsense.
Do not average vintages. The variability is the story. A five-year average tonnage hides the fact that one of those years lost a third of the crop to a February freeze, and it is exactly that variability that determines how growers plant and how wineries plan.
Do not quote a number without its date and its source. This page gives ranges for that reason. If you need a precise figure for a specific year, take it from the source for that year and say where it came from.
What the numbers say about the province
Ontario's is a small grape industry by world standards, a fraction of a percent of world vineyard area, and among the smaller wine regions of the New World. It is also the largest in Canada by a wide margin, and it has grown in acreage, in vinifera share and in the number of wineries more or less continuously since the replanting of the late 1980s. The direction of travel in the statistics for thirty years has been the same: more vinifera, more estate-grown fruit, more wineries, a slowly rising acreage, and a crop whose size from one year to the next is decided in February.
The original ontariograpes.com carried a page of statistics for the Lake Erie North Shore in the early 2000s. That address now redirects here. Those figures are twenty years out of date and have not been reproduced; the sources above have the current ones.