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This year, the National Wine Awards of Canada celebrates a quarter-century of our once-a-year snapshot of Canadian wines.
This year, the National Wine Awards of Canada celebrates a quarter-century of our once-a-year snapshot of Canadian wines. As the co-founder, along with Toronto wine critic David Lawrason, we have been privileged to have shone a light on the developing Canadian wine scene, especially in its formative years when it needed a voice to help tell its story. Our annual benchmarking of Canadian wines judged at the highest level by Canadians has been a dream come true for David and me.
From the outset, the goal has been to create a level playing field for all Canadian producers to compete against their peers nationwide, informing them of their progress and, more importantly, sharing that information with consumers. I'm happy to say our goal has been achieved, if not exceeded, with fairness and objectivity in the true sense of those words.
The inaugural awards occurred in June 2001, in a loft on the top floor of Toronto's Royal York Hotel. We received approximately 500 entries and had eight judges. The results were compiled on a spreadsheet; how we managed to make it happen remains a mystery. Back then, the awards were known as the Canadian Wine Awards. It was run under the auspices of Wine Access Magazine for the first dozen years.
During that period, the number of entries and judges more than tripled, corresponding to the rapid growth of the Canadian wine industry itself. In 2013, Wine Access Magazine ceased publication, and the Awards were reconstituted as the National Wine Awards of Canada under the ownership of WineAlign but run by the same team since its inception.
Over the last dozen years, The Nationals have continued to expand with increasing sophistication in the tasting room among judges and the wine itself, as well as in the backroom, where an army of volunteers, well-oiled and fine-tuned, serve thousands of perfectly poured glasses over five long days. The volunteers have worked tirelessly to meet a standard that assures a calm and quiet tasting room where glasses are presented at a precise level and temperature, creating a perfect-tasting environment. Behind the scenes, fact-checking takes place over five days, and every entry is checked multiple times to ensure its provenance, vintage, and price.
The short story is that the wines are tasted blind in flights organized by wine style or grape, while a computer-activated shuffle determines the order of the wines within each flight. Every year, we tell judges that the first wine of the first day could be the best wine of the year, so it's game on from the start to the finish. The top-scoring 25-27 percent of the wines are tasted twice by a minimum of eight judges, and the results are professionally analyzed and comprehensively reported online for the world to see.
The annual tastings have moved around the country, stopping in wine country, stretching between British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. We have sought to create a roster of primarily Canadian judges with global wine credentials, supplemented by a handful of international wine personalities with strong judging résumés. Our judges come to us from various wine paths, including writers, sommeliers and retailers.
The pandemic interrupted the run in 2020, but WineAlign published a Canadian Wine Buyers Guide based on the hundreds of samples sent to the office in Toronto. In 2021 and 2022, we resumed judging with COVID-19 protocols in place, and since then, the number of entries has fluctuated between 1,800 and 2,000 wines, assessed by 24 judges from as many as 230 wineries.
The 2025 Nationals return to the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre in British Columbia. We want to thank the hundreds, maybe even thousands, who have been a part of the Awards, from our family of talented judges and tireless background volunteers to the wineries who have supported this endeavour by entering wines and everyone who has helped with shipping, warehousing and preparing the venues. It has been a labour of love for 25 years, but we wouldn't have it any other way. In a year in which our sovereignty has been challenged, the awards should have an extra meaning for all of us in Canada. Look for the results in mid-July online at WineAlign.com and Gismondi on Wine.
A special thanks to all the volunteers, judges, and the WineAlign team in Toronto, including David Lawrason, Bryan McCaw, and Sarah Goddard, and to my partner at Gismondi on Wine, Earl Paxton, who encouraged me to abandon the XL sheet, who listened to the needs of a wine nerd and visualized the first software from a sketchy outline and has become an awards guru in the backroom over the last 2o+ years. Finally, thanks to Mark Taylor of Urbanity Publishing, a wine lover and software designer/programmer whose brilliant mind has continually improved the software that makes it all happen.
