As they have for several years, WineAlign recently held the National Wine Awards of Canada. As I did last year, I plugged all the results into a spreadsheet, cleaned it up, and looked at what it told me.
Again, a few notes about how I handled the data:
- The ‘score’ metric I refer to below is my calculation and not WineAlign’s. For each wine I assigned a score of 1 for a bronze, 2 for a silver, 3 for a gold, and 5 for a platinum.
- I excluded mead, cider, and fruit wine.
- They don’t publish how many of each wine type are submitted, just how many win awards, so I can’t determine any kind of efficiency metric per winery or region.
Here’s what jumped out at me once I compiled everything:
BC and Ontario continued to dominate. BC won 52% of the medals, up from 49% last year. Ontario won 46%, down from 48% last year. Nova Scotia and Quebec regressed slightly, with NS winning only 11 medals (0.9% of the total) down from 15 last year, while Quebec wineries took 9 medals (0.8% of the total), down from 13 last year.
Some historic powerhouse varieties lost ground in 2026. In BC the top five wines were red blends, rosés, Pinot Noir, sparkling, and Riesling — Cab Franc was 6th, while perennial BC powerhouses like Chardonnay and Syrah finished 7th and 12th respectively. Perhaps that in combination with the jump in BC’;’s rosé scores points to impact from wildfire smoke? In Ontario much remained the same: Chardonnay, Sparkling, Pinot Noir, and red blends repeated in the top five, while Cabernet Franc squeaked ahead of Riesling.
The benches dominate again. Naramata Bench in BC ruled the west, while the Beamsville bench in Niagara led Ontario. A further note on Beamsville: when Winealign announced their top ten Ontario wineries, four of the top ten — Fielding, Hidden Bench, Organized Crime, and Thomas Bachelder’s “bat cave” — are in one little 1km-loop just west of town. After you finish that loop, you can stop in at Le Clos Jordanne, Rosewood, or Thirty Bench which, by my calculations, was the 13th-highest ranked Ontario winery.
About that: Peller? Again, I don’t know exactly how WineAlign calculates their “best wineries” lists, but their rankings and mine tend to line up. For example, this year my score said Tawse was the top-scoring winery, and WineAlign duly named them the top winery in the country. But I noticed something weird this year, noted by italics below.
| My ten highest-scoring Ontario wineries | WineAlign’s top ten Ontario wineries |
| 1. Tawse 2. Fielding 3. Malivoire 4. Bachelder 5. Hidden Bench 6. The Organized Crime 7. 13th Street 8. Black Bank Hill 9. Queenston Mile 10. Inniskillin | 1. Tawse 2. Fielding 3. Black Bank Hill 4. Bachelder 5. The Organized Crime 6. Malivoire 7. Hidden Bench 8. Queenston Mile 9. Palatine Hills 10. Peller |
I’m not sure why Palatine Hills and Peller are there. No offense to Palatine Hills; my surprise is more directed at Peller wines which, outside of their smaller brands like Thirty Bench, I find pretty pedestrian. In addition to 13th Street and Inniskillin, I had Huff Estates, Redstone, Thirty Bench, Divergence Wines, Henry of Pelham, Domaine Queylus, and Grange of Prince Edward all finishing ahead of Peller or Palatine Hills when it came to total points scored
My first guess is that WineAlign picked their top eight using total score, but awarded Palatine Hills and Peller the last two spots because their average score per awarded bottle was high. If average score per bottle awarded had been the criteria for the whole list, Tawse wouldn’t have even made the top ten.
But no: in terms of average score among the top highest-scoring Ontario wineries, Black Bank Hill is first, Palatine second, and Inniskilling third. Peller is tied for fourth with Bachelder. Now, that small a difference could be chalked up to a difference in how I calculate things vs. WineAlign does. To the best of my knowledge they don’t publish their scoring rubric. But it’s hard not to feel like Inniskilling got cheated a little.
[Disclosing my bias: I used to work for Arterra, which owns Inniskillin, and I always thought Inniskillin was underrated.]
Platinums. Only 20 wines were awarded platinum this year, down from 30 last year, but there was more varietal diversity (10 varieties/types winning vs. 7 last year). Only two wineries — Laughing Stock in BC and Malivoire in Ontario — had more than one platinum award. By the way, Laughing Stock had the highest average award score of any winery in the country. Also of note: a Sauvignon Blanc!
- Chardonnay: BC 2, ON 3
- Red Blends: BC 1, ON 2
- Pinot Noir: BC 1, ON 1
- Cab Sauv: BC 1, ON 1
- Syrah/Shiraz: BC 2, ON 0
- Sparking: BC 0, ON 2
- Cab Franc: BC 0, ON 1
- Riesling: BC 0, ON 1
- Sauv Blanc: BC 0, ON 1
- White Blends: BC 1, ON 0
