This is my final article on Canadian Wine Trends 2021, where I will cover Canadian interest in Ontario and BC wines. Not that this is a competition between these two provinces. I am curious to see how much interest there is in Canadian wine and if there are any preferences by province. Again to try to figure this out, I used Google Trends to review their query data for 2021. We were all basically staying at home during COVID, so we had time to query Google about Canadian wine, buy Canadian wine, and drink Canadian wine. What did Google Trends reveal about our interest in BC and Ontario wines?
Canadian Interest in Ontario and BC Wines
I made two graphs for each province. In the top row are BC and Ontario wines in general, and in the bottom row, I selected the most popular region within each province; Okanagan and Niagara. Just comparing BC and Ontario, BC appears to have interest across Canada, excluding the Maritime provinces while Ontario is missing interest in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Maritime provinces. Each province has the highest interest in the wines they produce, which is understandable. It is interesting to see how little interest there is as a percent for the next highest queries for BC and Ontario wines. Alberta at 12 for BC and BC at 13 for Ontario wines. BC has the second-highest level of interest in wines from Ontario, while Ontario has the fifth-highest level of interest in BC wines. The line graph for BC shows overall interest with a wider higher peak in the summer months. The Ontario wine line graph shows overall interest, but rather strangely has two very deep pits in the summer months. Is this when the Ontario government instituted some lockdown measures? I also notice that the peak for Ontario wine is not very large for the December holidays. BC wine queries had a peak in December, but not as high as the summer peaks.
Let’s dive deeper now and check out Canadian interest in Okanagan and Niagara wines. I see that the interest in both provinces’ wines comes from BC, AB, ON, and QC. MB, SK and the Maritime provinces do not register with significant amounts. Again BC’ers were most interested in their wines and Ontarians were most interested in their own wines. Again there is a steep drop off in level of interest in these wines from other provinces. Alberta is at 34% to BC wine interest, while Quebec is at 8% interest for Ontario wines. The line graphs do look very different from each other. BC’s Okanagan line graph is very spiky with the spikes gaining in height around summer. The second highest group of peaks was in the Easter season and quite low for December. Ontario had interest in their Niagara region wines starting in May and formed a tall wide peak in July and August, then dropped downward in the Fall and Winter. The jaggedness of the line graph for BC wine queries looks very odd as if people forget then remember and then remember again that there is Okanagan wine. I am impressed with the strong full peak of the Ontario wine queries. Interest did not fade quickly, rather it continued to build to a peak then slowly decreased.
I hope you enjoyed reading through all four of the articles I wrote about Canadian interest in wine. Here are links to the first three articles, in case you missed reading some of them:
Canadian Wine Trends 2021: Red and White Grape Varietal Wines
Canadian Wine Trends 2021: Red, White, Rosé, Sparkling, and Ice Wine
Canadian Wine Trends 2021: New World and Old World Wine Interest
