Canadas Best Wines 2021: Chardonnay

People often ask me: What’s Canada’s top grape? I reply without hesitation: Chardonnay. With a country the size of ours — from B.C.’s Pacific-lashed wine islands to Nova Scotia’s bracing Atlantic — there’s no one grape that could possibly be suitable, yet alone excel. But there is Chardonnay, the most transplanted white grape in the world. It’s particularly suited to our latitude, climates, soils and — thankfully, in recent years — our maturing winemaking. The Chardonnay flights were my highlights to judge this year, and in my very first flight, I found some gold-medal-worthy wines. There were four platinums awarded, surprisingly all from B.C. Not surprisingly, they were all from the lauded 2019 vintage, a stellar year for white wines. I’d be happy to drink, and hold, any of the top-scoring Canadian Chardonnay this year and recommend keen wine lovers to do the same. —TREVE RING