Buyers Guide to Vintages August 15th Release

Take-Out Nation: Why Ontario Is Ordering In — and What to Pour with It; Ancient Roman Grand Crus, and Best of Campania 2026

By John Szabo MS, with notes from David Lawrason, Sara d’Amato, Michael Godel, and Megha Jandhyala

The numbers are impressive: in the past year, 55% of Canadians have used SkipTheDishes, 54% have dialed up Uber Eats, while 49% opted for DoorDash. According to information gathered by Made in CA, a majority of adult Canadians regularly use at least one of these platforms to order in food. And if you are among them, you won’t be surprised to learn what most Canadians are ordering in, according to data compiled by SkipTheDishes in 2020, Chinese food was the long-standing leader and remains a top choice today. Italian food came second, led of course by pizza. Thai ranked third in national search/interest data and Indian fourth, followed by Mexican and Middle Eastern.

As far as specific dishes go, the leader board looks like this:
1) Butter chicken
2) Poutine
3) Pad thai
4) Shawarma
5) Sushi
6) Chicken sandwiches, burgers & fries

Sound familiar? So, what’s a wine drinker to enjoy at home with these non-European cuisines (Italian aside) that have no obvious regional wine logic? Read on for a few suggestions from the Vintages August 15 release, whose thematic is, you guessed it, take-out wines.

I’ve also just published my annual Campania report, fruit of a visit in May, with over 200 wines tasted and with a buyer’s guide featuring the best sparkling, white, rosato and red wines. The annual event was hosted in the province of Caserta this year, so I decided to explore three ancient native varieties found only in this corner of Campania, which could well have featured in ancient Rome’s most celebrated crus: pallagrello bianco, pallagrello nero, and casavecchia. Never heard of these grapes? Read the article to learn more and discover which to try.

Spotlight on Caserta: Roman Era Grand Crus

*The Reggia di Caserta, the former residence of the kings of Naples.*

If you want to taste two thousand years of “grand cru” Italian wine, go to the province of Caserta in Campania. The Romans called this corner of the Medio-Alto Casertano the Ager Falernus, and Falernum was the great prestige wine of the late republic. Pliny lavished praise on it. A wine list still visible on the wall of a tavern in the ruins of Pompeii shows that Falernum commanded four times the price of the day’s regular vino da tavola in 79 C.E. Today, a clutch of estates on the slopes of Monte Massico still trade on the name as Falerno del Massico DOC. The ancient city of Trebula Balliensis sat just east, near present-day Pontelatone, and some scholars believe Pliny’s Trebulanum, a wine mentioned in the Naturalis Historia, refers to the ancestor of what is now a red wine bottled as casavecchia.

Read the full article on Campania Stories 2026 including Part One: Buyer’s Guide to Red and Rosato, with Spotlight on Caserta and native pallagrello bianco, pallagrello nero and casavecchia. Part Two features a buyer’s guide to the top sparkling and white wines.

Take-Out Nation: Why Ontario Is Ordering In — and What to Pour With It

There’s a particular kind of denial that grips an industry right before it changes shape. Ask any Ontario restaurateur how business is going and you’ll likely hear “busy” — and on paper, they’re not wrong. Restaurants Canada’s own data shows Canadians still walk through restaurant doors roughly 23 million times a day. What that daily tally obscures is where the actual growth is happening; not at the table, but on the couch, where folks — fork in one hand, phone in the other — track a delivery driver’s icon across a map.

The numbers tell the story plainly enough. Canada’s online food delivery services — essentially non-existent as a consumer demand a dozen years ago, when SkipTheDishes was a Winnipeg startup and Uber Eats hadn’t yet arrived in Toronto — pulled in roughly $26 billion (Canadian) in 2024, according to statistics gathered by Grand View Research. That’s up from about $4.7 billion in total online food spending as recently as 2019. Call it a five-fold increase in five years, which is the kind of growth curve wine regions can only dream about. Forecasts have the market climbing to $39 billion by 2030. This isn’t a pandemic blip that failed to unwind; it’s a permanent recalibration of how Ontarians eat on a Tuesday night.

Ontario’s own dine-in restaurant sector, meanwhile, is having a considerably rougher time of it. Industry watchers have called 2025 one of the toughest years on record for the province’s independent operators, and 2026 hasn’t offered much relief: walk-in traffic remains soft, food and labour costs keep climbing and — per Restaurants Canada’s national Q1 figures, which Ontario operators echo closely — roughly a third of restaurants are now breaking even or operating at a loss, triple the rate seen in 2019.

Cost, unsurprisingly, is the villain of this story. TouchBistro’s 2025 survey put the average dine-in check at $63, up $7 in a single year. Ordering in, by contrast, runs about $38 on average — and that figure actually dipped slightly year over year, as diners get savvier about which apps and which orders offer real value. When the math is that lopsided, “let’s just order in” stops being an excuse for laziness and starts being a rational economic decision.

What’s notable, and relevant to anyone who cares about what’s in the glass, is what Ontarians are actually ordering. The cuisines dominating national delivery data — butter chicken and naan, pad thai, shawarma and mixed grill platters, sushi and miso soup, poutine, and the ever-present chicken sandwich-burger-and-fries trinity — have almost nothing to do with the wine world’s traditional regional pairing logic. There is no appellation that was built to answer to butter chicken. I suspect nobody in the Loire ever workshopped a cuvée against a donair. This is the current reality of contemporary Canadian drinking: a plate built from Punjab, Bangkok, the Levant, and a fry truck in Northern Ontario, with a bottle expected to make sense of all of it.

The simplest answer is to stop looking for the “correct” regional match, because it doesn’t exist, and just drink something you enjoy. But if you want to take your pleasure a little more seriously and increase your chances of discovering new flavour synergies in untraditional places, start pairing by structure and intensity instead. Conveniently, the LCBO’s August 15 Vintages release gives us a working shortlist — proof that you don’t need to match a regional appellation to a dish’s origin, just a clear-eyed read on texture and flavour and a sense or adventure. What’s the worst that could happen?

Here are a few wine suggestions from the release to try with Canada’s most ordered takeout dishes.

For butter chicken and naan, national takeout’s perennial number one or two: Jules Taylor Pinot Gris 2025, Marlborough, New Zealand ($22.95). Its round, creamy texture and the faintest suggestion of sweetness (a measured 4 grams/litre, nothing alarming) mirror the dish’s richness, while the white-fleshed orchard fruit and a pleasant varietal bitterness on the finish cut straight through the buttery, spiced sauce.

For red-sauced pizza, Ontario’s second favourite after Chinese, there is at least a clear regional map to follow, and an obvious choice for both style and value from the release is Ricasoli’s Antico Feudo Della Trappola 2022, IGT Toscana, Italy ($15.95). It’s a fine, plump, sangiovese-based Tuscan red that brings savoury, dusty-earth and dried-cherry flavours to the table at an easy Tuesday night price, and its brisk acidity settles in comfortably alongside a simple pie’s char and tomato. For something a little more upscale, in the same stylistic universe if not the same country, try Apostolos Thymiopoulous 2022, PDO Naoussa Greece ($27.95). Fans of Italian reds will feel right at home with this savoury, firm and dusty red made from xinomavro, a natural stand-in for sangiovese or nebbiolo-based wines.

Poutine, the domestic comfort-food constant, can go in several directions. Sparkling wines are a sommelier favorite, elevating the occasion, but you could just as easily go with Redstone’s Gamay Noir 2022,VQA Lincoln Lakeshore, Niagara Peninsula ($25.95). Silky and fully mature, with fine, fading red fruit shifting into savoury territory, this lightly chilled Niagara gamay has exactly the finesse and levity needed to sit alongside gravy and cheese curds without adding unwanted weight.

Shawarma and mixed platters call for something fleshier and bolder in flavour, like Montes Alpha Carmenère 2022, Colchagua Valley, Chile ($21.95). This is textbook carmenère, fruity and herbal with resolved, powdery tannins and a velvety, sweet-oak-touched texture, with the structure and flavour intensity to see eye-to-eye with shawarma’s char, garlic, and spice without being pushed around.

Pad thai finds an almost too-obvious partner in Domaine Welty Bélénus Gewürztraminer 2023, AOC Alsace, France ($23.95). Its rich, off-dry palate of lychee cream, elderflower and rose candy plays directly into the dish’s sweet-spicy, tamarind-and-chili balance. The wine’s sweetness tempers the dish’s heat and its umami finds a contrasting fruitiness of equal intensity in the wine.

And for sushi, where (refreshingly) the old logic still holds and any bone-dry, high-acid white or sparkling wine will do the job, it’s worth taking a detour from classics like Champagne or Chablis to try this Greek white beauty: Mega Spileo Assyrtiko 2024, PGI Achaia, Greece ($21.95). Dense, structured and bracingly fresh, this is one of the better bottles I’ve tasted from the estate, with a level of complexity that comfortably outruns its price.

Chicken sandwiches, burgers, and fries — the actual volume leader by raw order count, don’t need anything so considered: a juicy fruit-forward red, chilled lightly, will always get the job done, as will a crisp or creamy white with your chicken burger. I’d try something like the Alain Jaume Grand Veneur Côtes Du Rhone 2024, AOC Rhône France ($19.95). It’s an attractive white CdR, soft and creamy, with pleasant botanicals and bitters serving the purpose of refreshment rather than acids, more of a complementary than contrasting paring and as comforting as the crispy chicken.

And if takeout takes you literally out for a picnic and convenience enters the equation, consider a versatile, and easy-to-transport option like Hinterland Borealis Rosé Sparkling 2024 VQA Ontario ($7.95/250 mL). What’s of note here is not the wine itself, necessarily — this fruity charmat-method bubbly has been around, and consistent, for many years and is not intended to change the world. But it now comes in a handy 250 mL single-serve aluminum can, attractively dressed up. It’s an ideal format for beach/picnic/patio/park/dock or wherever — for sipping in lieu of a beer or soda or seltzer. The wine inside is fresh, frothy, bubbly, easy and fruity, of no great shakes for complexity, but that’s not the point. This is about simple pleasure and convenience. Drop in the cooler bag and go.

The dazzling growth of takeout foods shouldn’t be mistaken for a crisis for wine. It’s really an opportunity. The dinner table hasn’t disappeared — it’s just moved to the coffee table, and it’s carrying dishes from three different continents at once. The fun now is matching what’s in the glass to that reality, not to some imagined regional orthodoxy that never had shawarma on the menu to begin with.

Buyer’s Guide Vintages August 15: White, Rosé & Sparkling

Stars Brut Nature Reserva Cava 2023, Spain
$17.95, Hanna Neal Wine Merchants (John Hanna & Sons)
Michael Godel – Emblematically Cava in style, authentically honest and proper. A terrific price for a dry, traditional method sparkling wine.
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