Results from the 2025 Nationals – Pinot Gris/Grigio

Announcing the Results from the 2025 National Wine Awards of Canada

The 2025 Nationals took place in Penticton from June 21st to 25th. Today, we are pleased to announce the winners in the Rosé, Pinot Gris/Grigio and Orange Wines categories. Category results will be rolling out throughout the rest of July, concluding with the Winery of the Year announcement on August 1st. We hope that you will stay tuned to follow the results!

Pinot Gris/Grigio

Category Overview by Judge John Szabo, MS

Go straight to the winners.

While there are a few notable highlights, the pinot gris/grigio category this year surely counts among those that suffered the most acutely from the extreme events in the Okanagan Valley of the previous two vintages. The variety is/was the most planted white grape in the Okanagan and somewhat of a signature wine, but the devastating cold snap in early 2024 resulted in near-total crop loss that year, while some examples from 2023 were tragically tainted by smoke from wildfires. This took many top examples out of the game, lowering the number of entries and weakening the overall category performance.

In the end, just two golds were awarded, one to BC’s Roche Wines 2023 Tradition Pinot Gris from the Naramata Bench of the Okanagan, a sumptuous, round, “Alsatian” style, and one to Ontario’s Huff Estate 2023 Buried Vines Pinot Gris, a lighter and sharper style in the Prince Edward County idiom, with representative flinty-stony character. Both are excellent, if stylistically different, a feature not only of diverse climates, soils and winemaking ambitions, but also of pinot gris/grigio’s multifaceted and malleable personality.

Seven of the 11 silver medals went to Ontario wines, a variety not generally considered a qualitative mainstay in the province (with the exception perhaps of emerging PEC examples), as well as 10 of the 15 bronzes, further underscoring how much the judges missed BC bottlings, even if a respectable 28 of 52 entries total (54%) received a medal of some colour. It should be noted that there are several solid ‘stand-in’ wines made by BC wineries from Washington State grapes (considered as a separate category from Canadian-grown wines), also well priced, which will help to fill the gap until Okanagan vineyards are back online.

And the winners are…