Ice Ice Wine
Frozen Grapes and U. While Niagara’s Icewine Festival was cancelled for a second year in a row because of you-know-what, there is still reason to celebrate this wintery wine. Ice wine is a type of dessert wine made from grapes that have been naturally frozen on the vine. It takes about 8 pounds of grapes to make one half bottle of ice wine, where that same amount would make 6-7 times as much dry wine. Talk about juice from concentrate! Canada is the largest ice wine producer with 96 wineries producing it. And as Jancis Robinson puts it: “A really good icewine/Eiswein tastes like a cross between the purest form of grape juice and a slap in the face, so vibrant is the acidity.”
Ice Wines to Watch. The Globe and Mail’s Christopher Waters’ invitation to open a bottle of icewine made a case to enjoy a glass this weekend, though he wrote his article to coincide with #IcewineDay, which was on January 1st. But still! Ice wine! Enjoyable! And keeps in the fridge for up to two weeks! According to the article, there’s been a decline in Canadian icewine exports, down to 137,422 litres in 2020 from 336,395 litres in 2016, a 59% drop. Waters writes that despite Canada’s award-winning icewine reputation, “the consensus is the dessert style wine is too sweet and expensive.”
From a critic’s perspective, the decline in sales has helped to reduce the number of icewine producers down to ones who are truly serious about quality. Icewines that are simple and cloyingly sweet are rare to find following the 2016 harvest. Wineries that focus on single vineyard or estate grown selections, particularly icewines made from riesling and cabernet franc grapes, are ones to watch.
Waters recommends Cave Spring Riesling Icewine Estate Grown 2017 (“the brightness of the acidity nicely balances the concentrated sweetness of this remarkable wine”), and Inniskillin Riesling Icewine 2019 (“this lusciously sweet dessert wine shows the brilliance of the riesling grape”).
Fewer BC Wineries Making Ice Wine. The Vancouver Sun's Cold snap ideal for icewine, but fewer B.C. wineries are making it, also talks about the decline of Canadian icewine exports. “Fewer wineries may be choosing to make it because more people are buying B.C. red and white wines, creating less incentive to take a risk on icewine,” according to Miles Prodan, president of Wine Growers BC. According to the article, Hainle Vineyards Estate Winery produced the first icewine in North America in 1978, “a bottle of which is estimated to be worth as much as 1.5 million pounds at the London wine auction.” Meanwhile, Summerhill Pyramid Winery just harvested 11.5 tonnes of grapes in -19 C temps; ice wine represents about a quarter of the winery’s annual income.
More Wine Predictions 4 U. Last week’s newsletter was about Wine Predictions, and to add a few more to the list comes VinePair’s Here Are the Wine Trends Reddit Thinks We’ll See in 2022. Of the 235 comments in the subreddit Wine people of the world! What do you think are the newest wine trends we will see in 2022, posted by David_Bowies_Drugs on January 11, VinePair published the ten best, some of which include: Branded wines, as in the Oreo wine, submitted by Dravin84 who predicted “a full Nabisco line of wine crossovers” (for an additional hot take see What fresh hell is this? Wine that tastes of cookies?); Bordeaux will have the vintage of the century, submitted by TheRealVinosity; and Lambrusco, as submitted by search64, who wrote “I feel like quality Lambrusco is up for a bit of a hype.”
