Canadian Wine Trends 2024: BC and Ontario Wines

In 2022, I reviewed the 2021 wine trends across Canada, by province for different grape varieties and by regions around the world. To do this, I used Google Trends. Google Trends. Wikipedia describes Google Trends as “…a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.” Google Trends does not give you the absolute number of say queries for Cabernet Franc interest in Ontario, but if it is the most across the country, it is given a value of 100. Then all the other provinces are scaled by their volume. For example, if BC was 87 that would mean that BC people queried 87% of the volume of Ontarians for Cabernet Franc. It does not show if Canadians actually bought a bottle of wine, but does give us an idea of what we are interested in drinking.

I thought it was about time that I checked into Google Trends for 2024 to see how Canadians’ tastes have changed over the last 3 years. The cost of living has gone up, so has that caused us to change the wines we buy? I will start my Canadian Wine Trends to see how much we enjoy BC and Ontario wines. The top of each chart is a trend line showing Google Search interest in the terms “Okanagan wine” and “Ontario wine”. The bottom of each chart shows a map of Canada, with darker blue meaning more interest. Grey means either no interest or not enough queries in the region to show up. You can click on each chart to enlarge it.

It is not surprising to see that BC wines have the most interest in BC followed by our neighbour, Alberta. Ontario wines are of most interest in Ontario, followed by the Maritimes. The graphs do have a different shape, with BC wines generally having a strong interest throughout the year, with a slight rise in the summer months, while Ontario wine interest is generally at the same level and then jumps by a factor of two around July, peak summer time. The Christmas holiday season does not show a big spike in interest for BC wine but shows a small bump for Ontario wines.

2021 vs 2024 Canadian Wine Interest

Here are the two charts for BC (Okanagan) wine and Ontario wine for 2021. Let’s see if there are any differences between the three years.

For BC wine, it appears that there is an overall strength or interest in BC wines in 2024 compared to 2021 and that the main two provinces, BC and Alberta, have the strongest interest. Of note, Manitoba now shows up with the third most interest in BC wines.

Checking Ontario, it appears that interest was more even across the year. There is no summer holiday spike like we see in 2024. The other item of interest is that BC and Quebec had the second and third most interest in Ontario wines in 2021, but have been replaced by Maritime provinces in 2024. Perhaps Ontario wines and their winery association increased their promotion of ON wines in that time period in Ontario as well as the Maritime provinces?

My next Canadian wine trend articles will cover red and white grape varietals, sparkling wines from around the world, wine regions around the world, and other alcoholic beverages we are drinking. It should be quite interesting. Cheers!