Ontario Wine Doesn't Suck Anymore

In 2001, when Mike Traynor was starting out as a winemaker, he was processing 30 tonnes of Chardonnay grapes. “There was one bin that I forgot about, and when I got back around to it, it had fermented on the skins. And I thought, ‘Huh, this is really interesting,’” he recalls. Traynor had unintentionally made an orange wine long before the term became popular. In 2013, when he opened Traynor Vineyards, his winery in Prince Edward County, the first vintage was — you guessed it — an orange wine. “We were way ahead of the curve,” he says.

Today, Traynor Vineyards is still making “huh, interesting” wines — unfiltered, bottle-fermented pet-nats (they were the first in the province to do it), lower-ABV piquettes, and skin-contacts — that are helping to shift Ontario’s long-held reputation for wine that was forgettable at best, undrinkable at worst. Over the past few years, the province’s viticultural offerings have gone from bottom-shelf last-resorts from the Wine Rack to bottles worth buying and bragging about. But rewriting Ontario’s wine story took more than just good grapes.

“There’s a reason why our parents didn’t look at Ontario wine for anything of quality, because there wasn’t any,” says Gabriel Demarco, the COO at Cave Spring winery, a medium-sized operation that produces 60,000–70,000 cases of wine a year and sources 95% of its grapes within a two-kilometre radius in Niagara’s Beamsville Bench. 

Ontario's historical reputation for bad wine comes from early attempts at imitation. “Many conventional wineries were trying to turn their wines from what they should be into something that tasted like it came from Tuscany or California. And it just didn’t hit,” says David Everitt, the co-owner and winemaker at Paradise Grapevine, a winery headquartered on an industrial-turned-hip stretch of Geary Avenue in Toronto. Lorein Codiamat, the director of culture at the popular Toronto bar, bottle shop, and wine importer Grape Witches, agrees. “It’s not like we’ve always made fabulous wine,” she says.