Insights, standout wines, and personal moments from Niagara’s International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration 2025
This July, some of our editors and contributors attended the 15th anniversary edition of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration—better known as i4C—in Ontario’s Niagara wine country. With more than 60 participating wineries and hundreds of cool climate wines from Canada and around the world, the 2025 edition marked a major milestone and a forward-looking chapter.
Programming spanned walk-around tastings, vineyard lunches, the Chardonnay in the Vineyard World Tour Tasting & Dinner, and the signature School of Cool conference—anchored by a keynote positioning cool climate wines as central to the future of the industry, delivered by Clive Pursehouse.
Read about last year’s i4C: Summer’s coolest event celebrates the diversity of chardonnay
With themes ranging from climate volatility to shifting drinker preferences, the 2025 i4C looked squarely at where wine is going—not just where it’s been.
Below, some of our editors and contributors share their biggest takeaways from the weekend:
Alana Lapierre (Regional Editor)
Of all the things said at i4C this year—and there was no shortage of smart, honest, and needed commentary—Clive Pursehouse’s keynote has stayed with me. His address—centered on the idea that cool climate is the future of wine—felt less like a provocation and more like a simple, evidence-based truth.
With climate volatility reshaping the map of viable wine regions, cool climate zones—once seen as marginal—are now models of resilience. As Pursehouse noted, they come with built-in mitigating factors and a track record of freshness, balance, and finesse. Coupled with the rise of new drinker preferences—towards lower alcohol, brightness of fruit, and mineral-driven acidity—it’s clear: cool climate isn’t just a technical designation, it’s as much about philosophy as geography, shaping how wine is grown, made, and enjoyed.
He also referenced Michelle Bouffard, founder of Tasting Climate Change, an international symposium that has become a leading platform for exploring climate change’s impact on the wine industry and how the sector can respond to what Bouffard calls “climate chaos.” It’s a reminder that sustainability isn’t just about viticulture—it’s also about taste, culture, and attitude.
Clive Pursehouse gives the keynote address at i4C 2025 (photos of Clive by Alina Zherdeva Photography)
Other takeaways that hit home? Natural wine emerged in the keynote not as a passing trend, but as one of the most important categories among younger drinkers—an audience whose preferences for freshness, bright fruit, crisp minerality, and lively acidity closely align with cool climate styles. That overlap gives cool climate producers a clear opportunity with this demographic as they mature into the next generation of wine consumers.
Yet, as Pursehouse noted, the industry’s biggest Achilles’ heel remains its conservatism. Wine needs new voices willing to move beyond the familiar playbook—voices that reject the idea of wine as a trophy and instead champion it as something to be shared, to make meals better, to make time with loved ones better, and to make life better. In this view, status is not the future of wine; conviviality is.
At i4C this year, cool climate stood as both a measure of resilience and a marker of where wine is headed, showcased through wines defined by freshness, precision, and finesse—while also making a case for a redefined vision of what wine can, and should, be.
Matt Steeves (Contributor)
As Divergence winemaker Jeff Moote noted, “Chardonnay is a great communicator of place.” That message resonated throughout Niagara, where the region’s limestone-rich terroir and cool-climate conditions continue to produce wines of world-class structure and elegance.
Standouts included Divergence’s 2020 Blanc de Blancs (Hughes Vineyard, Lincoln Lakeshore) — a beautifully textured sparkling chardonnay with flinty minerality, salted croissant, and orchard fruit-filled pastry notes. Tastings of extended lees-aged traditional method wines, such as Tawse’s 2010 David’s Block “Spark” chardonnay (12 years en-tirage), confirmed Ontario’s rightful place among the world’s top sparkling producers, with wines that echo the elegance and aging potential of Champagne.
Sparkling wines have become a major draw at i4C events (Photo by Alina Zherdeva Photography).
The event also spotlighted both new wave and established fan-favourites, with producers like Stratus, Cloudsley, Bachelder, Leaning Post, and Kelly Mason continuing to impress with their nuanced, terroir-driven chardonnays. Even BC’s CheckMate crossed the country to showcase its extraordinary single-vineyard expressions, proving just how diverse and exciting Canadian chardonnay can be. These are must-taste wines if you come across them.
Adding to the excitement, Jonas Newman at The Grange of Prince Edward is crafting superb wines that have catapulted this historic winery back into the spotlight. With so much innovation and excellence on display, i4C25 was not only a celebration of chardonnay’s global story but also a powerful reminder that Ontario’s cool-climate wines — chardonnay, riesling, pinot noir, and cabernet franc among them — continue to impress wine professionals worldwide.
Lidija Biro (Contributor)
This is it. This is the ‘rise of cool’. The timing is right for Canadian cool climate wines. Global warming has thrown the balance off in wines from many traditional regions but has handed us the ‘holy grail’ – ripe fruit and great acid structure. Moreover, younger wine drinkers have moved away from ‘over-ripe, same old regions’ – looking for refreshing whites, rosés, chillable reds, and of course ‘no occasion required’ sparkling wines!
Canadian wines can answer that call… hands-down or perhaps elbows-up!
(Photo by Alina Zherdeva Photography).
Carmelo Giardina (Principal Editor)
My most memorable experience from this summer’s i4C event actually had very little to do with chardonnay (gasp!). Instead, it was riesling that left the biggest impression on me—specifically, a bottle of Cave Spring’s ‘Adam Steps’ Riesling enjoyed right at the geological landmark that gives the wine its name.
On a perfect, sunlit summer day, our media group set out with winemaker Gabriel Demarco for a hike up the Niagara Escarpment. Starting from Jordan, where Cave Spring’s winery and vineyards are situated, we made our way toward the “Adam Steps”—a striking series of limestone outcrops that form part of the escarpment above the Cave Spring Vineyard. These natural formations aren’t steps in the traditional sense but weathered layers of stone, each carrying the weight of geological history and providing a dramatic backdrop to the vineyards below.
Cave Spring winemaker Gabriel Demarco opens a bottle of ‘Adam Steps’ Riesling at the actual Adam Steps, set within the Niagara Escarpment.
When we arrived at the site, Demarco pulled out a bottle of the 2023 Adam Steps Riesling and poured it for the group. Standing at the very place that inspired the name, glass in hand, it was easy to connect the dots between land, wine, and story. The wine itself—off-dry with bracing acidity, flavours of lime zest, ripe orchard fruit, and that unmistakable wet stone minerality—seemed to echo the escarpment beneath our feet.
For me, that moment captured what makes Ontario wine so special. It wasn’t staged or showy—it was simply a winemaker, a vineyard, and a bottle that told its own story. It reminded me that wine, at its best, isn’t just about what’s in the glass. It’s about where you are, who you’re with, and how a place can find its voice in liquid form.
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