Results from the 2026 Nationals – Cider

Announcing the Results from the 2026 National Wine Awards of Canada

The 2026 Nationals took place in Niagara, Ontario from June 12th to 18th. Today, we are pleased to announce the winners in the Cider, Mead & Non-Fruit wine, Fruit wine, Fortified, Maple wine, Icewine and Late Harvest categories. Category results will be rolling out throughout the rest of July, concluding with the Winery of the Year announcement on July 31st. We hope that you will stay tuned to follow the results!

Cider

Category Overview by John Szabo MS

Go straight to the winners.

Cider arrived at this year’s National Wine Awards of Canada freshly reorganized, its entries split for the first time into five distinct sub-categories—Barrel-Aged or Specialty, Fruit/Botanical/Perry, Heritage (Traditional), Ice and Fortified, and Modern (Contemporary & Sessionable)—a reflection of just how far the segment has matured beyond a single catch-all bin. Combined, the five sub-categories drew 62 entries and awarded 39 medals, a healthy 62.9% hit rate, but with a notable asterisk: no gold or platinum was awarded in cider this year, all 39 medals coming as 15 silver and 24 bronze. That’s a shift from 2025, when Thornbury Craft Co.’s Tragically Hip Road Apples took home Best Cider honours alongside four other golds, and from 2024, when Vieni Estates’ sparkling apple cider claimed the category’s single gold. It’s my personal feeling, however, that our wine-centric industry is still coming to terms with the broad palette of styles and flavours lurking the cider category, and that unfamiliarity underlies the medal colours more than any inherent lack of quality. As styles become more familiar, I suspect the medal count will rise, and appreciation with it.

Geographically, the category split almost evenly along Canada’s cider heartland: Ontario claimed 14 medals, British Columbia 13, and Nova Scotia 11, with a single Quebec medal rounding things out—a distribution that tracks closely with where the country’s roughly 400 commercial cideries operate. Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Cider Company was the standout producer of the year regardless of medal colour, collecting eight medals spread across multiple sub-categories, trailed by Ontario’s Thornbury Craft Co. with six and a trio of three-medal wineries in BC’s Sea Cider and Lonetree and Nova Scotia’s Island Folk Cider House.

It’s worth noting that cider’s place in the Canadian drinks landscape is older than wine’s: fermented apple beverages were being made around the island of Montreal in the 1600s, arguably the country’s oldest alcoholic beverage tradition, nearly extinguished by decades of temperance before a Quebec-led revival in the 1980s reignited the category nationwide. At an average retail price of just $14.02 across this year’s medal winners—a fraction of the cost of the wine categories in this report—cider remains an accessible, still-underappreciated corner of Canadian drinks culture, its growth story and geographic breadth firmly intact even in a quieter year for top medals.

And the winners are…