“When you’re shopping for wines, local is always going to be your best bet in terms of the carbon footprint,” says Andrea Kaiser, chair of Sustainable Winegrowers Ontario (SWO), a sustainable standards certification body for wineries and vineyards.

But Kaiser, who literally grew up in the Ontario craft wine business as daughter of famed wine pioneer Karl Kaiser, is adamant that the Ontario wine industry cannot stand on this simple premise. She believes it’s critical for the industry to tackle its community and environmental impacts.

“First and foremost, we want consumers to buy Ontario and make sure that it’s VQA and uses 100 per cent locally grown fruit, and then there’s a second layer in the SWO certification,” she says.