WARM UP WITH ICEWINE!
The culture of winemaking stretches back some 8,000 years, to the east coast of the Black Sea.
The culture of wine enjoyment likely began about a month after that happy day in the Caucasus region.
Icewine - wine made from grapes allowed to freeze naturally while still hanging on the vine - seems to have originated in southern Germany a little over two centuries ago. It is an increasingly popular part of the culture of wine enjoyment, though due largely to the difficulties inherent in its production icewine will never be available in incredibly vast quantities.
So, if you haven’t enjoyed this relative newcomer to the world stage of wine, get on the bandwagon now! Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to introduce yourself & your Valentine to icewine, or to further your appreciation of it, should you be an aficionado already. And the Niagara Region is the perfect place to do it. The winners of January’s Niagara Icewine Festival will have settled down and you’ll be able to enjoy some of the finest, most highly regarded icewines in the world.
It is the consistency of the winters in Niagara’s winemaking districts, the predictability of perfect temperatures for specific timeframes, which allow for the region’s consistency in producing the superb icewines which have been acknowledged planet-wide.
The complexities of flavour that play in a sip of any fine wine are incredibly heightened in the icewine experience. A huge number of factors are in action, but perhaps most telling are the interactions of - are you ready for some technical oenophilispeak? - residual sugars and titratable acids. Put simply, this means you shouldn’t expect your icewine to be cloying. You may be whispering to your Valentine, as you peer into your tiny glass of once-frozen grapey goodness, “This looks almost - what’s the word I’m trying for, sweetheart? - ‘syrupy’!” You should be delightfully surprised to find it delightfully refreshing.
The producing of any fine wine is a complex dance of skill, timing, risk, the inexorable changing of geography and climate and so on. Luck even enters into the dance. When making an icewine, all those elements are present, and in addition we’re talking about working outside in the dead of winter with days and nights of temperatures under minus eight degrees Celsius! Imagine the crunch of footfalls as the vineyard is patrolled. Are the grapes frozen solid again? Good. Is this the fifth or sixth freeze-thaw they’ve been through? We know the grapes are ripe; the big question is: is the time ripe? The call to the pickers goes out and dozens, scores, hundreds are mobilized for the quick careful picking and sorting which must take place in the subzero wee hours! The pressing of the frozen nuggets of joy will yield a fermentable juice that is an intense joining of those sugars and acids, aromas and flavours.
There is a debate that’s been gently simmering for a while now in Niagara, where we’re too polite to let our debates rage, especially when they have to do with our wine. the debate concerns the advantages of aging icewine versus enjoying them as soon as viticulturally possible. Agers make the point that a good icewine possesses high enough acidity and sugar levels to merit years of subtle mellowing. The young-as-possible camp believes the distinctions making icewine a favourite are dependent upon freshness and near-immediacy. The debate continues. Taste-test enough and you can get your two-cents in. (Please, though, don’t get us started on the whole vexing debate over “icewine” versus “ice wine”.)
Dozens of Niagara Region’s many wineries are active in the icewine field. Just a few of the award-winners includes Peller Estates, Chateau des Charmes, Birchwood Estate, Flat Rock Cellars, Jackson-Triggs, Pillitteri Estates, EastDell, Henry of Pelham, Royal DeMaria and Inniskillin.
A surprising range of grape varietals are used to produce the wide array of different Niagara icewines you might be trying. Part of your fun this Valentine’s Day should be visiting several of the above mentioned wineries - and they’re all within about an hour of travel time through some of the most scenic winter countryside in North America - to discover which grape produces your new best icewine friend. Will it be Vidal or Cabernet Blanc or Merlot? Perhaps it will derive from a Shiraz or Gewurztraminer.
And if it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Niagara’s icewine producers must be tremendously flattered. You know you’ve reached the world stage when you get counterfeited! Chinese entrepreneurs, among others, have taken to making not only knockoff movie DVDs and Olympic souvenirs, but faux Niagara icewine as well. Our icewine has such status that it’s entirely possible there are more counterfeit “Niagara icewineries” than genuine ones!
Lastly, here are a few phrases you can research in preparation for explaining to your friends why your Valentine’s Day icewine exploration was so terrific. (Alternatively, you may wish to mutter some of them in a knowing fashion while taste-testing Niagara’s finest.) Candied citrus. The terroir of the Niagara Escarpment. Freeze-thaw cycles. Tannic components. Body-backbone-balance. Try tossing out “hazy garnet bomb”; we’ve never actually heard that one, but maybe it will soon be tripping off the connoisseurs tongues as frequently as the icewine rests there. If you find yourselves able to try one of Niagara’s new sparkling icewines, be ready to praise its texture, the perfect scaling of sweetness & tartness, the brix degree, the weight of the must, the reminiscent nose....
What inspired the first icewinemaker to take a chance with the millennia-old wine concept by pressing frozen grapes? We’ll never know, but please join us in raising a sweetly intense glass to him or her, and whisper a heartfelt “thank you!”
