About

Vino Veritas covers Ontario wine and the practice of growing grapes in a continental winter.

The province grows fruit at roughly the latitude of Bordeaux and gets weather that Bordeaux never sees. Everything on this site follows from that: the lake effect that makes the Niagara Peninsula viable, the buried trunks in Prince Edward County, the −8°C rule that governs an icewine harvest, and the appellation system that began as a growers' agreement in 1988 and became statute in 1999.

The site is organised in six sections — the ground, the grapes, winter, the press, the appellation and the people — and every piece is listed in the archive.

Regulatory statements name the instrument they come from: the Vintners Quality Alliance Act, 1999, Ontario Regulation 406/00 made under it, and published work from Brock University's Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute, established in 1996.