Grape varieties

Vidal: the most planted grape in Ontario

Vidal occupies more Ontario vineyard than any other variety and accounts for well under one per cent of the province's VQA table wine sales. That gap is not an anomaly to be explained away. It is the entire point of the grape.

A hybrid bred for a problem Ontario happens to have

Vidal Blanc was bred in the Charente in the 1930s by Jean-Louis Vidal, who crossed Ugni Blanc with a Seibel hybrid in the hope of producing a grape for cognac that would resist the cold. The cognac application went nowhere. What he had made instead was a white grape with thick skins, loose clusters and enough winter hardiness to survive a continental winter, and it found its permanent home four thousand kilometres away on the north shore of Lake Erie and the Niagara Peninsula.

In the classification the province uses, Vidal is a French-American hybrid, which places it in Table 2 of the VQA regulation's list of authorised varieties — the hybrids that may be named on a label. That status matters commercially, and it is why Vidal appears on bottles while several other hybrids grown here do not. The varieties page explains the three families and why Ontario grows all of them.

Why the thick skin decides everything

A grape destined to hang on the vine until January has to solve a set of problems no table-wine grape faces. It must resist bunch rot through a wet autumn, because rot spreads through a tight cluster and a crop cannot be picked in December if it has collapsed in October. It must hold on to its pedicels so the berries do not drop as the vine is buffeted through November. And it must keep its acidity while the sugars concentrate, or the resulting wine is merely sweet.

Vidal does all three. The skins are unusually thick, the clusters hang loose enough for air to move through them, and the acid holds. Nothing else available in Ontario in the quantities required does the job as reliably, which is why the province's icewine industry was effectively built on a single variety.

What the numbers say about its standing

In the varietal study Grape Growers of Ontario commissioned from Agri-Metrics covering 2018 to 2022, Vidal ranks first in the province by acreage, ahead of Chardonnay and Riesling. Its acreage was declining over that period at roughly 1.7 per cent a year, one of the faster contractions among the leading varieties, in a vineyard whose total area was close to flat.

Against that, VQA table wine sales of Vidal through the LCBO in 2023 came to about $885,000, or 0.8 per cent of VQA table wine sales — a rounding error beside Pinot Gris at roughly $15 million. The two figures are not in tension, though no published source reconciles them directly. The reading that fits both is that most of the Vidal crop never becomes table wine at all: it becomes icewine, sold in small bottles at high prices through channels these table-wine figures do not count, and a good deal of it exported. The pricing structure below supports that reading, but it is an inference from two separate datasets rather than a reported figure.

The price schedule tells the same story from the grower's side. For the 2026 crop, Grape Growers of Ontario prices Vidal in class 7a at $847 a tonne, alongside Seyval Blanc — roughly a third of what Pinot Gris or Sauvignon Blanc command. But icewine and late harvest grapes are paid at the varietal base price plus 129 per cent, so the grower who hangs the crop is working from a very different number, and accepting the risk that goes with it. The statistics page explains how to read these figures without over-reading them.

The ripeness bar

Under Appendix A of the regulation, a varietal Vidal Blanc table wine must reach a minimum average of 18.0° Brix. Unlike the vinifera varieties, it has no separate, higher threshold for wines carrying a specific appellation, because the appellation tier applies to Vitis vinifera. For icewine the bar is entirely different and applies to every variety alike: 32.0° Brix at the press and 35.0° average in the final blend, with the fruit picked naturally frozen on the vine.

Where it is planted, and why it is shrinking

Vidal is grown across the Niagara Peninsula and on the Lake Erie North Shore, and it tolerates sites that would be marginal for vinifera, which historically made it the sensible planting on colder or less favoured ground. Its slow decline in acreage reflects two pressures at once: growers replanting better sites to vinifera that pays two to three times as much per tonne, and an icewine market that has been flat rather than growing. A variety can be first in the province and still be in gentle retreat.

How hardy is it, really

Vidal is among the hardier varieties grown here, which is the reason it sits on ground vinifera cannot hold. Putting a single number on that is harder than it looks. Bud hardiness is usually expressed as LT50, the temperature at which half the primary buds in a sample are killed, and it is not a fixed property of a variety — it moves through the dormant season as the vine acclimates in autumn and deacclimates during a thaw, so the same block can differ by several degrees between January and March. Brock University's CCOVI runs the VineAlert programme, which samples buds through the winter across the Niagara sub-appellations, the Lake Erie North Shore and Prince Edward County, and publishes current values by variety and site. That, rather than any figure quoted here, is what a grower should be reading in February. The climate page covers winter injury and what growers do about it.

Vidal is the grape behind the page the old ontariograpes.com linked to most often. The Viticultural Roundtable's members on the Lake Erie North Shore grew it, and their notes on frozen-harvest timing are the reason the icewine page exists.