Water flows freely in Southern Ontario but wineries face stringent wastewater regulations

Along Canada's Niagara Peninsula where about 80 percent of Canada's grape volume is produced on approximately 11,000 acres in southern Ontario, the issue is sometimes too much water. Most of the wineries along the Niagara Escarpment, a 575-foot-high ridge of bedrock that borders Lake Ontario on the north and the Niagara River along the east, have buried tiles under each row of vines to drain excessive water.

"When we do have a bit of a dry spell, the vines survive by their roots going a bit deeper for groundwater," explained Scott McGregor, winemaker at Diamond Estates Wines & Spirits, a Toronto-based company that owns several wineries in the Niagara region, including EastDell Estates which has 85 of its 110 acres on the Escarpment planted.

Some of the modeling done to predict the effects of climate change has suggested that Ontario and the other eastern provinces would initially receive more rain as global warming heats up the water in the Great Lakes and causes it to evaporate into clouds to a greater extent. A lowering of the jet stream, which usually has precipitation to the south of it, also helps to explain the duck weather last July in Ontario.

Although they don't have to irrigate, EastDell and most of the other two dozen wineries along the Niagara Escarpment must truck several thousand gallons from nearby towns to provide water for their wine production and hospitality facilities. "There are no pipelines pumping water up here onto the escarpment," McGregor said.

To cut down on the number of truckloads, EastDell and several neighboring wineries have installed bio-filtration systems to collect the wash-water from their production buildings and hospitality facilities. The system is set up for wash-water to flow through a series of beds with cattails and aggregate rocks that naturally filter it. The water becomes clean enough to disperse as groundwater or, better still, captured into tanks and used as greywater to hose flowerbeds or flush toilets.

"On a hot summer weekend, toilet handles get used a lot," McGregor said. "So doing this is a saving for us and the environment because we're reducing the number of trucks that need to burn fuel to ride up here."

Dan Elder, who is in charge of maintenance, also came up with the idea of using the extra poly tanks that EastDell had as oversized rain barrels to collect roof-water from the eaves and troughs on the hospitality building.

"All the water that comes off that metal roof now goes through screens that we set up on the top of the large tanks and we've trenched a water line to the gardens in front of the restaurant with a water-jet pump that we can now use for those flowerbeds," McGregor said. "Any water that we can save really counts."

Ontario enterprises using more than 50,000 liters (13,208 gallons) per day are required to obtain a water license from their local authority and become subject to vigorous reporting requirements. Fines are stiff.

A fairly abundant water supply has put more of the emphasis on maintaining quality rather than conservation. The provincial and local governments have stringent regulations that govern how different industries can discharge water. The Wine Council of Ontario (WCO) has run numerous seminars in conjunction with Ontario's environment ministry to ensure vineyard and winery owners put the correct wastewater plans in place and follow them diligently.

Every winery must have a discharge plan that includes emergency measures. All of the wineries are subject to spot inspections by the provincial government.

Water conservation and quality assurance form a part of the WCO's sustainability guide. Eco-Winegrowing outlines all the regulations and rules to obtain water by drilling a well, linking up to a municipal pipeline or having it trucked.