Striking Oil in Niagara

Written by Rosemary Mantini | 24 February 2010

Forget yoga class — driving through Niagara is the kind of Zen experience that both relaxes and energizes. A recent visit found my husband and I exploring the many restaurants, shops and wineries we happened to pass. It was at the Upper Canada Cheese Company that we heard of something very neat happening in Niagara. Two wineries had actually started producing and selling their own grape seed oil. Not nearly as well known or extensively used in North America as its viscous brethren produced from olives, peanuts and canola, oil pressed from the seeds of grapes has been popular in Europe for at least 500 years.

The story of Ontario grape seed oil actually begins 11 years ago when Joseph Pohorly (owner and winemaker at Joseph’s Estate Wines) decided that there was perhaps a better way to deal with all of the pomace left over from the winemaking process than carting it off to the dump. He got the ball rolling by devising a way to turn that waste into a delicious product. The years that followed saw him exploring the best method of extracting the tiny bit of oil stored in each seed. He purchased the necessary equipment, and by 2002, was producing and selling grape seed oil on site. Stratus Winery recently followed suit with its own version. Southbrook Winery, too, toyed with the idea. Owner Bill Redelmeier collaborated with Vinifera for Life co-founder Mark Walpole last year to create a very small test-batch of unfiltered oil. “It was incredibly flavourful, really pungent,” says Redelmeier. “It tasted like a cross between olive oil and sesame seed oil.” With grape seed oil needing, what else: “grapes,” perhaps the biggest roadblock here is the quantity of grapes available. Whereas the wineries of the Niagara region might as a whole produce 45,000 to 50,000 tonnes of grapes per season, that same amount could be generated by one single winery in Italy or France. The low output makes producing the oil a potentially money-losing venture. Winemakers in Europe use the literally hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stems, seeds and skins left after the grapes have been pressed to craft spirits (like grappa), make compost, and, of course, press for oil. For sure, the huge amount of pomace available to them helps keep production costs down, but many European winemakers also save money by sending their seeds to a communal press.

The Niagara region has been working hard to catch up. Many wineries now send their pomace to a central composting site. Some, like Magnotta, create Ice Grappa from the leftover frozen skins of Icewine grapes. Stratus shares Joseph’s press, and the two of them bottle their own oil, pressed from their respective seeds. Suzanne Janke, Director of Retail and Hospitality at Stratus, stresses that sustainability has become a mantra for many wineries around them. She says, “When Stratus learned of the technology, we decided it would be a great way in which to extract even more from our vineyard.” Despite some higher costs, environmental stewardship has resulted in new ways of looking at the bottom line. And grape seed oil might just be the way to go.