Canada’s Top Wineries

2016 WineAlign National Wine Awards of Canada (The Nationals)

The 2016 WineAlign National Wine Awards results have now been released and you can find all the medal results here. Today we wanted to share with you a much broader look at the results in terms of the performance of the top 25 wineries, Ontario’s top ten, British Columbia’s top ten, and the top ten Best Performing Small Wineries (10,000 cases and under), as well as the coveted Winery of the Year and the Best Performing Small Winery of the Year.

With a record 230 wineries involved in the awards and over 1,500 wines anyone getting into the top 25 list should take a well-deserved bow. Our performance evaluation touches on any winery entering five or more wines in the competition, in essence automatically entering that producer into the race for the 2016 WineAlign Winery of the Year.

After that, we tally the top five scores entered. Each performance score begins with the wine’s raw base score as awarded by the judges out of 100 points. Then, employing a series of calculations the wine receives additional points depending upon whether or not it was awarded a bronze, silver, gold or platinum medal. The value of any medal takes into account the total number of medals awarded in each class and the total number of medals issued overall to produce a unique performance score.

That total, added together with a winery’s other four top scoring wines, is used to assess its performance against all others entered in the competition, resulting in the list of top performing wineries. What it all comes down to is one of the most useful wine lists in the country, and a true guide to which wines and wineries are performing at the very top of the Canadian wine industry.

The 2016 Winery of the Year is Tawse Winery, located in the Niagara Peninsula, Ontario. The win is the fourth for Tawse since 2010.

The 2016 Best Performing Small Winery (10,000 cases and under) goes to Lake Breeze in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia.

Winery of the Year

Tawse Winery
Niagara Peninsula, Ontario

5 Gold, 8 Silver, 4 Bronze

Tawse Winery 2013 Pinot Noir Tintern Road
Tawse Winery 2014 Riesling Carly’s Block
Tawse Winery 2013 Pinot Noir Cherry Avenue
Tawse Winery 2014 Sketches Riesling
Tawse Winery 2014 Riesling Quarry Road Vineyard

Read More: Four-Peat Sake! Tawse Winery of Niagara does it Again

Best Performing Small Winery
(10,000 cases and under)

Lake Breeze
Okanagan Valley, British Columbia

1 Platinum, 3 Gold, 2 Silver

Lake Breeze 2014 Semillon
Lake Breeze 2012 Winemaker’s Series Riesling
Lake Breeze 2015 Sauvignon Blanc
Lake Breeze 2015 The Spice Jar
Lake Breeze 2015 Pinot Blanc

Read More: Lake Breeze, Where Small is Beautiful