Niagara Peninsula

The harvest the Niagara Peninsula is famous for happens at night, in January, at minus ten: pickers in headlamps pull frozen Vidal and Riesling grapes off the vine and press them while they are still frozen, so that only a few drops of syrup run out. Ontario’s VQA rules demand minus 8 degrees or colder at picking and pressing; if the thermometer climbs above that, the harvest stops. Germany, where Eiswein was born, allows minus 7, and the main difference is reliability: between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment it gets cold enough every winter, which is why more than 90 per cent of Canada’s icewine comes from Ontario, most of it from here. About 5,500 hectares of vines grow on the peninsula, the great majority of Ontario’s roughly 7,000 hectares and the largest vineyard in Canada, ahead of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

The lake and the cliff

The peninsula lies at 43 degrees north, the latitude of Tuscany, yet the winters are continental and spring frost is a real danger. Lake Ontario warms slowly and cools slowly; the Niagara Escarpment, a wall of limestone and shale rising about a hundred metres above the lake and running the length of the region, forms the other barrier. Between the two, air circulates constantly: in autumn breezes off the summer-warmed lake keep cold air from settling and stretch the season into October; in spring the cold lake holds the buds back until the frosts have passed. It is the same job that Lake Geneva does for Lavaux, on a larger scale. The effect fades with distance from the shore, and that is what the VQA’s ten sub-appellations map: the benches on the escarpment such as Beamsville Bench and Twenty Mile Bench, with clay-rich soils, and the flatter, warmer land of Niagara-on-the-Lake along the river.

Grape	Sweetness	Acidity	Tannin	Body
Riesling	dry to luscious	high	white, no tannin–	light to medium(+)
Chardonnay	dry	medium to high	white, no tannin–	medium(−) to full
Cabernet Franc	dry, also medium-dry	medium(+) to high	medium(−) to medium(+)	medium(−) to medium(+)
Pinot Noir	dry	medium(+) to high	low to medium	light to medium
Gamay	dry	medium(+) to high	low to medium(−)	light to medium

Each grape’s typical range worldwide, not in this region alone, on the WSET tasting grid (Level 3, 2022): dry to luscious, low to high, light to full. The dot before each name shows the colour of a typical bottle. Outlined: a sweet style beside the dry wines.

A Grand Prix in Bordeaux

Modern Niagara is young: in 1975 Donald Ziraldo and Karl Kaiser founded Inniskillin at Niagara-on-the-Lake, and in 1984 they made their first icewine from Vidal. The free-trade agreement with the United States in 1988 forced the move to quality: the same year Ontario’s producers created the Vintners Quality Alliance as a voluntary standard, and the Vintners Quality Alliance Act of 1999 made it law. In between came the breakthrough: at Vinexpo in Bordeaux in 1991 Inniskillin’s 1989 Vidal icewine won the Grand Prix d’Honneur, and Canadian icewine was suddenly on the world’s wine lists.

5,500 ha Niagara Peninsula has about 38 % of the Swiss vineyard.

One square is all of Switzerland: about 14,350 hectares of vines.

1. Niagara Peninsula5,500 ha
2. Okanagan Valley4,400 ha

Vineyard area in hectares, rounded, as the articles give it. Regions without a reliable figure are left out.

Beyond the dessert wine

Icewine is the postcard, but only a small part of the crop. The still wines are what the sommeliers of Toronto pour: Riesling with the tension of a cool year on the Mosel; Chardonnay, taut enough for the region to give it a festival of its own, the i4C, which has brought cool-climate producers to Niagara since 2011; Pinot Noir; Cabernet Franc, which ripens here more reliably than Cabernet Sauvignon; and Gamay. At the table: Riesling at 8 to 10 degrees with lake perch or Asian food, Cabernet Franc at 16 with roast pork or duck, and icewine, cold at 6 to 8, with blue cheese or a fruit tart.