Icewine - 1 Good Reason for Cold Weather

Filed in archive Wine Making on February 16, 2007

We are all freezing right now. Even down here in sunny Florida, we are freaking out with temperatures reported to drop into the 30s tonight. Yes, I know, boo hoo....But, that for South Florida is basically akin to a blizzard. We just don't get that cold. I keep telling myself that cold is good and one reason it is good is because it create icewine!!

From Ice, ice, baby:

Icewine is now produced by many British Columbia wineries, predominantly in the Okanagan Valley where the winters are cold enough.

The grapes for icewine are hand-picked in the middle of the night in their frozen marble-like state at temperatures of -8 C or colder.

The grapes are then pressed immediately, yielding just a few drops of a highly concentrated juice, very high in acids, sugars and aromatics. Due to the small amount of juice in each grape and the labour involved in the production, these wines will always be expensive.

The juice is then fermented slowly for several months until it stops fermenting on its own.

With some sweet wines like Port, the winemaker stops the fermentation by adding a grape brandy to achieve the desired sweetness. This is not the case with icewine: the fermentation stops naturally with no interference from the winemaker.

In some cases, the grapes are affected by a type of mold called Botrytis cinerea, which causes the grapes to shrivel, turn brown and dehydrate, increasing the concentration of natural sugar.

Some refer to this as Noble Rot - it looks very unappetizing, but makes beautiful sweet wines. A few grape varietials used to make icewine are Riesling, Kerner and Vidal.

This liquid gold has intoxicating honey and apricot aromas with flavours of apricot, peach and mango and is wonderfully sweet on the palate.