Table grapes

Table grapes in Ontario

Alongside its wine grapes, Ontario grows a small crop of grapes for eating fresh. Which varieties ripen here, when to find them, and why the crop has never grown large.

A small crop with a short season

Ontario's fresh-eating grape crop is a small fraction of its vineyard area, grown mostly in Niagara and to a lesser extent in Essex County, and sold mostly at farm gates, roadside stands and farmers' markets during a window that opens in late August and closes by mid October. Supermarket grapes in Ontario are Californian, Chilean or Peruvian for most of the year, and the local crop competes with them only for the few weeks it exists. It persists because there is a loyal market for grapes that taste like grapes, and because the varieties that work here have a flavour the imported ones do not.

The Concord inheritance

For most of the twentieth century the Ontario table grape was Concord, the blue-black labrusca variety that also went into juice and jelly, and its white relative Niagara. Both are seeded, both have the "slip skin" that separates from the pulp when squeezed, and both have the intense, musky flavour that North Americans think of as grape flavour and Europeans find strange. Concord and Niagara are still grown and still sold fresh in September, and for many Ontarians they are the taste of the season. They are also very hardy and very productive, which is why they survived a century of winters that killed everything else.

The seedless varieties

The modern Ontario table crop is built on seedless varieties bred for short seasons and cold winters, most of them developed at research stations in Ontario, New York and the American Midwest.

• Sovereign Coronation: the leading Ontario seedless blue grape, bred in British Columbia and released in the 1970s. Concord-like flavour, seedless, ripens in early September, hardy. The variety most people mean when they say Ontario seedless grapes.
• Vanessa: a red seedless variety bred at the Vineland station in Ontario, crisp and mild, ripening in mid September. One of the few Ontario-bred table grapes to find a commercial place.
• Himrod: an early white seedless variety from New York, ripening in late August, with a light, honeyed flavour and the drawback of loose clusters and a short shelf life.
• Canadice and Reliance: red seedless varieties from New York and Arkansas respectively, both hardy, both mid-season, both with a sweet labrusca-influenced flavour.
• Mars and Venus: blue seedless varieties from the Arkansas programme, grown in small quantities for their disease resistance and hardiness.

What these share is a genetic contribution from the native American species, which gives them the hardiness to survive here and a flavour that sits somewhere between Concord and the neutral crispness of the imported vinifera table grapes. What they lack is the size, firmness and shipping tolerance that make the Californian crop a year-round commodity.

Why the crop stays small

Three reasons. The first is the season: a crop that is on the market for six weeks cannot support a distribution system, so it is sold direct and stays local. The second is the varieties: the grapes that survive Ontario's winters do not ship or store well, and the varieties that ship and store well do not survive Ontario's winters. The third is economics: an acre of vineyard planted to Riesling or Cabernet Franc under contract to a winery is a more predictable return than an acre of table grapes sold at a roadside stand, and growers with good sites plant accordingly. Table grapes are grown by people who have a market for them, a farm gate or a pick-your-own operation, and by growers who keep a few rows of Coronation because their customers ask.

Finding them

Ontario table grapes appear at farmers' markets and farm stands across Niagara from the last week of August, with Coronation and Concord peaking in the second and third weeks of September and the later varieties into October. Some Niagara and Essex County farms offer pick-your-own. Outside those weeks the local crop does not exist, and a grape labelled as Ontario-grown in December is something else.

The original ontariograpes.com had a page listing table-grape vineyards in Essex County. That address now redirects here; the vineyards it listed have not been carried over, because the list is twenty years old.