Best Red Wines

How we pick Canada's best red wines

Every wine on this page won a medal at the National Wine Awards of Canada, the country's largest blind-tasting competition for Canadian wine. Wines go into flights by variety and style. No label, no winery name. Just the wine, scored against everything else in the flight, and that is the whole bar for making this list. Reds that medalled somewhere else, the All Canadian Wine Championships, live on our best red wine to gift page instead. The full range, medal or not, starts at Canadian red wine. Canadian wine keeps clearing that bar, and we are done being quiet about it.

Where the medals come from

Syrah, Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir are the grapes that keep winning here. Cabernet Franc is widely called Ontario's signature red, and it shows: red berry fruit with a herbal edge, mostly out of Niagara. Pinot Noir runs lighter than its French cousins, built around cherry and spice, and it grows in those same cool corners of Niagara that suit Cabernet Franc. British Columbia's medals lean into small-lot reds rarely seen anywhere else in Canada, Pinotage and Tempranillo among them, alongside a Cabernet Sauvignon or two.