Success Stories
A Niagara Region Success Story
Canadian Oak Cooperage
The new gold standard for oak wine barrels: how a Niagara Region company is making Ontario wines even more homegrown
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| Terence Van Rooyen, Niagara College Wine Maker and students. |
It was in a Brant County forest that Hamilton physician Dr. Jim Hedges first thought about using Ontario white oak to make wine barrels. Being an amateur winemaker and woodworker himself — and knowing some of the finest wineries in the world use white oak — he began to wonder if Ontario oak might yield the same results in wine making.
Hedges brought his idea to Dr. Mike Risk during a meeting of their small wine making group back in 1999. A wood worker and award winning wine maker himself, Risk agreed to help give it a shot. Their Canadian Oak Cooperage company was born.
Their first commercial release of Ontario wines aged in Ontario oak barrels was in 2002 and it was a success. So much so, that they decided to continue with their business idea and begin manufacturing and selling the barrels.
In early 2007 they called upon the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) 
for help with their research and development. They needed to prove that the local barrels truly yielded the same results as those French and American oak barrels used by some of the finest wineries in the world.
The OCE connected them with Niagara Research — Niagara College’s Research and Innovation Division. The goal was to test the merits of aging Ontario-produced wine in Ontario oak barrels to see if it measured up to wine aged in oak barrels from some of the world’s traditional wine-barrel-making regions.
Niagara Research and Canadian Oak Cooperage tested several Ontario-made wines in three different barrels — one made from American oak, one made from French oak and one made from Ontario oak — to see which barrel offered the best flavours for the wine during the maturing process.
The wine was also put through a sensory analysis and chemical analysis, and the wines from the Ontario oak barrels were entered into the 2009 Cuvee competition in Niagara — a prestigious wine-tasting competition.
The result — wine from the Ontario oak barrels won gold for its category.
As a result of the partnership between the college and the company, Canadian Oak Cooperage is selling more and more wine barrels to Niagara winemakers. Many wineries are producing 100 per cent homegrown Ontario wine, and Niagara’s wine industry is bringing more prosperity to the region.
“The Canadian Oak project is a shining example of the strength of partnerships,” said Dan Patterson , President of Niagara College. “Ontario has so many bright people with great ideas who bring different skills to the table. That’s the real strength of the OCE. And, many more of these types of collaborations will flourish under the Ontario government’s new Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) .”
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