"Below six degrees Fahrenheit, there is no more juice coming out," says Karl Kaiser of Inniskillin. "Our perfect harvest window is from 14 degrees Fahrenheit to 7 degrees Fahrenheit."
Photo: STEPHEN DOMINICK STUDIO
Cold Gold -Mining Winter's Nectar from Northern ExtremesBy Howard G. GoldbergNorthern vineyards are casinos that feature winter's poker game, which pits vintners against nature. The gamblers, facing stacked odds, never stop trying to beat the house. If the thermometer plummets far enough, they will cash in their chips - unpicked frozen grapes - for the big payoff: ice wine.
Although northern Germany created this dessert nectar, Canada's production surpasses Germany's. And now that ice wine has put Canada on the international wine map, Ontario and British Columbia vintners are gripped by the risks and rewards of extreme winemaking.
At least 52 of the 121 licensed wine producers in Ontario have made ice wine. For them, bottled young ice wine - crystal-clear, as pure and refreshing as glacier-melt water - illuminates their commercial terrain the way the northern lights glow above their snowfields at night.
Royal DeMaria Wines typifies the direction the province is taking. The proprietor, Joseph DeMaria, makes only ice wines. (He also owns and works in a hair-styling salon in Toronto.) The wines come not just from the grapes that introduced the phenomenon - riesling and Vidal blanc - but also from chardonnay, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, gamay, gewürztraminer, merlot, muscat ottonel and pinot gris.
DeMaria's winemaking is self-taught, his wife, Charlene, says. Their 25-acre property yielded 1,000 cases of Vidal in 1998, his first vintage; the 2002 vintage consists of 800 cases totaling eight varietals. In the States, retail prices range from $44 for a half-bottle of 2001 Vidal to $2,500 for a half-bottle of the 2000 Pinot Gris.
Generally, all ice wines carry, in various combinations, aromas and flavors of apricot, guava, honey, mango, nectarine, passion fruit, peach, pear and pineapple. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Will consumers abandon Sauternes from Bordeaux, Tokaji Aszú Eszencia from Hungary, Trockenbeerenaulese and Beerenauslese from Germany, Port and Madeira from Portugal, and Sherry from Spain for this upstart dessert beverage?
True believers in DeMaria's hometown, Vineland, Ontario, might imagine so, given his record. His wines have accumulated 43 gold medals in 42 contests. Perhaps this tally contributed to his puffy declaration that Royal DeMaria is "Canada's Ice Wine Specialists."
That boast ignores Inniskillin, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, whose internationally renowned founders, Donald J. P. Ziraldo and the Austrian-born Karl J. Kaiser, have since 1984 produced what the pre-eminent British critic Hugh Johnson calls Ontario's "international flagship," and his iconoclastic colleague Oz Clarke calls "Canada's main trump card."
A giant in Canadian winegrowing, Inniskillin, a 130,000-case-per-year winery, produces sizeable quantities of ice wine, ranging from 90,000 bottles in 2001, a lesser year, to 240,000 in 2002, a fine year. A sister winery in British Columbia, Inniskillin Okanagan, also produces ice wines. The elixirs from both win gold medals galore. The combination makes Inniskillin the world's No. 1 producer of ice wine.
A pivotal moment for the entire Canadian wine industry occurred in 1991 when Inniskillin's 1989 Vidal Ice Wine won the Grand Prix d'Honneur at Vinexpo, a major trade exposition in Bordeaux. The company's subsequent emphasis on the quality, range and packaging of its ice wines induced other Ontario estates to enter the potentially lucrative field.
A man of vision, Ziraldo played a key role in establishing in 1996 the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute at Brock University in Ontario, where, of course, ice wine is examined down to the last drop.
Inniskillin makes a Cabernet Franc, Chenin Blanc, Dornfelder, Riesling and sparkling Riesling, and regular and oak-aged Vidal ice wines. But the heart of the matter is Riesling and Vidal.
Across Canada, generally, Riesling is Audrey Hepburn, Vidal is Marilyn Monroe (an admittedly dated comparison).
The Canadian spelling is icewine; the American, ice wine. Both usages were influenced by the German eiswein (pronounced ice vine), for a speciality associated primarily with the Rheingau and Mosel-Saar-Ruwer regions.
Long-hang-time eiswein, a 1962 through 1970s phenomenon in Germany, though possibly a late 18th-century or 19th-century accidental discovery there, has spread to cool-climate grape-growing terrain like Austria, the Finger Lakes region of New York, Washington State, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota and Illinois.
The natural approach - letting bunches of healthy grapes cling to vines into mid- or deep winter and hand-harvesting them after a hard frost - is the German, thus classical, approach. In Germany, riesling makes the greatest eiswein, followed by muskateller, silvaner, Scheurebe and spätburgunder (pinot noir). >
Dr. Carl-Ferdinand von Schubert, the squire of Maximin Grünhaus, the ne-plus-ultra property in the tiny Ruwer region, once told me: "If the grapes sound like marbles in the can or bucket, the quality will be good." But, "if they sound like snowballs, you fear for the quality. Then we stop, and wait for another day." As the consummate punster Terry Theise, a groundbreaking importer of German and Austrian wines, put it: "Many are cold, but few are frozen."
An alternative to the natural method is picking clusters of late-harvest grapes at the peak of their physical maturity and sweetness levels, freezing them artificially at controlled temperatures in refrigerators until they are solid and then pressing them.
This cold-storage technique is known by the somewhat macabre name "cryoextraction," which evokes horror film life-after-death images. In Sauternes, cryoextraction has been used in wet vintages since the 1980s by Château d'Yquem, and has thus acquired powerful credibility.
Still, who can blame the Germans and the Canadians, whose legislation requires natural-born ice wine, for belittling cryoextraction as unsporting? If a vineyard is a green baize table in the warm months, isn't the gambler entitled to rake in a fortune from it if he goes for broke in November, December, even January?
Icewine Niagara, an exporter in Niagara Falls, Ontario, with a solid portfolio of producers, explains plausibly if self-servingly on its Internet site (www.icewineniagara.net) why always labor-intensive ice wine is costlier than regular table wines: "Low yields and high associated costs and risks assure that quality ice wines will never be inexpensive. Yields from frozen grapes are about one-tenth that of the nonfrozen variety. Costs are high since grapes must be quickly picked and pressed while still frozen. This requires precise timing, rapid deployment and luck, since if temperatures rise, the resulting vintage cannot be labeled as ice wine. Instead it would be called 'late harvest' and sell at a much-reduced price from ice wine."
The economics are the same in Canada and Europe. The Internet site of Michael Skurnik Wines, a major importer in Syosset, New York (www.skurnikwines.com), in January listed 35 Terry Theise eisweins from Germany and Austria ranging in price from $40 for a 500-milliliter (Darting) Pfalz Muskateller to $393 for a 375-milliliter (van Volexm) Saar Riesling.
In Germany, producers can plan for eiswein, but they cannot depend on it, because suitably cold winters are irregular. By contrast, the Niagara Peninsula's climate virtually guarantees ice wine year after year; fairly predictably, temperatures plummet to the 17 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit range.
Can Canada's near-certainty be diminishing? Global warming and El Niño weather patterns have become worrisome. For the 2001 harvest, Inniskillin's literature says picking took place in March 2002, the latest on record. In 2002, the harvest began December 2 and ended January 28, 2003. The 2003 harvest began January 6. (Ice wine vintage dates derive from the year the grapes are grown, not the year they are picked.)
With sales blossoming, ice wine has become a $45 million to $50 million business in the province. Overall, "Canadian wineries export approximately 17,000 cases worth about $9 million at the retail level," says the Wine Council of Ontario, a trade association.
Lobbying by Canadian ice wine producers to crack the European market paid off in 2001 when the European Union agreed to permit imports. Today Japan, China and Taiwan are also major export markets for Canadian ice wine.
According to the council, in 2002 Ontario produced 46,393 cases containing a dozen 375-milliliter bottles; in 2001, it produced 43,703. A 375-milliliter bottle, the standard size, retails on average for $50 (American).
The main winegrowing regions lie in southern Ontario (the Niagara Peninsula, Pelee Island and Lake Erie North Shore) and British Columbia (the Fraser, Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys and Vancouver Island). Since southern Ontario's winters are consistently colder than British Columbia's, 90 percent of Canada's ice wine originates in Ontario. Spring frosts can kill vines and cause bud damage, drastically reducing yields, hence income.
The grapes must be picked and pressed in an uninterrupted process while the air temperature stays at or below 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The average sugar level of the juice must reach 35 degrees Brix minimally, and the alcohol and residual sugar in the resulting wine must derive wholly from the grapes' natural sugar. Some producers prefer to start harvesting at 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and, before picking reds, will tarry until the grapes have been frozen hard for a few days.
Brix is North America's system of measuring the sugar content in grapes before harvest and in the finished wine. (Germany's system is Oechsle; Austria's, Klosterneuburger Mostwage, or KMW.) Theoretically, the higher the numeral, the sweeter the wine; in practice, high acidity levels may offset the sweetness, leaving an impression of dryness or near-dryness.
Netting and perforated plastic sheets draping vine rows, and resembling Christo wraps, permit air circulation and reduce the danger of losing the grapes. Still, it is difficult to foil wipeouts by hordes of hungry birds (they destroyed Inniskillin's entire 1983 crop); other voracious animals; hail and windstorms that destroy posts, wires and protective coating; and rot after rainstorms.
As winter sets in, the set-aside grapes dehydrate and undergo biochemical changes caused by freezes and thaws. This process concentrates the acids (which are exceptionally high), the sugar and extracts in the grapes, intensifying their aromas, flavors and complexities.
While botrytis (noble rot) is crucial to trockenbeerenauslese and beerenauslese, which also results from long-hanging, dried, shriveled grapes, many producers think it taints eiswein, but some prefer the extra measure of complexity.
In Stephen Brook's indispensable new book, The Wines of Germany (Mitchell Beazley, 2003), Egon Müller IV of Egon Müller-Scharzhof, in the Saar region, one of Germany's most distinguished eiswein makers, observes: "It's not always easy to distinguish beerenauslese from eiswein. In 1995, our B.A. had a very high acidity, which gave it an eiswein character. And in 1973, 1985 and 1992, our eiswein didn't have very high acidity and could easily be mistaken for B.A. B.A. fetches slightly higher prices than eiswein, and in our view is the more complex wine because of the botrytis and concentration."
As a Germanophile, I think it likely that, allowing for the vintage, once you have tasted Müller's Scharzhof eiswein; or one from the Abtsberg vineyard of Maximin Grünhaus made by Carl-Ferdinand von Schubert in the Ruwer; or one from the Oberhäuser Brücke vineyard made by Helmut Dönnhoff of Hermann Dönnhoff in the Nahe; or one from the Kiedrich Gräfenberg made by Wilhelm Weil of Robert Weil in the Rheingau, you have had the Ultimate Experience.
Germany's television and radio weather reporters speculate whether certain deeply cold nights may bring the year's first eiswein. Indeed, the first such harvest is national news.
Reflexively, the press watches the Max Ferd. Richter estate in Mülheim on the Mosel, which has made eiswein since 1961, and only from its two-acre Mülheimer Helenenkloster vineyard, which faces southwest. Grapes there reach a spätlese ripeness every year.
"We took the chance in the 1970s to make eiswein a 'riding horse' for our estate," notes Dirk Richter, the proprietor. "We saw much earlier than a lot of colleagues that eiswein does enjoy some fascination that can help to highlight an estate much better than other wines do.
"Having reached a lot of experience in producing eiswein, we are taking special care during the vegetation season to enable us to produce very healthy grapes for a longer time than is required for grapes picked during the general harvest," he continues. "In order to produce healthy grapes for a very late picking, we do a very ecological treatment of the soil. Special care is given to the development of leaves to enable them to assimilate as long as possible. To protect the leaves against mildew botrytis, we use chemical agents."
Cryoextraction, Richter says, would kill the mysticism and the rarity of naturally frozen grape wine: "It would be similar to spraying botrytis fungus on the grapes in October to raise the harvest result of noble sweet wines. That might make sense economically, but it would destroy wine as a product of cultural heritage and historical legacy."
Nature yields wide swings. The smallest quantity Richter has ever made was 100 liters; the greatest, 1,600 liters. The lowest sugar level was 110 Oechsle; the highest, a remarkable 223 Oechsle; the highest acidity level, 16.5 grams per liter; the lowest, 8.6.
In Germany, when the temperature sinks to 17.6 Fahrenheit, warmly wrapped and gloved pickers bearing shears and buckets - winemakers, their families, vineyard employees, friends, neighbors, locals, even politicians seeking photo-ops - remove the clusters from snow- and ice-clad vines.
"The worst part about making eiswein is the wait," says Johannes Selbach of Weingut Selbach-Oster, in Zeltingen. "Deep frosts are rather rare in the Mosel Valley, and there may be one, maybe two, chances to make eiswein during a given winter. One doesn't want to miss that one night.
"If the forecast predicts a deep enough frost, the first step is to alert the pickers, who take buckets and big baskets on the trailer. The generator, big lamps and enough cable to move lights through the vineyard are tested.
"At 4 a.m., we check the temperature, and drive to the vineyard to touch the grapes to see whether they are frozen. The setting is usually beautiful, with smoke from the chimneys rising straight into the skies, the stars twinkling, and, if there is a half or full moon, the landscape is illuminated with a dim silvery light. Above all, there is an unusual silence at 5:30 a.m., making for a very special atmosphere. This may sound romantic, and in a sense it is."
The grapes must be taken before sunrise, when the temperature ticks upward and the ice starts to melt. Once the grapes have traveled to the winery, everyone gathers there for warming-up delicacies: hot sweet Riesling soup, strong coffee (with or without eaux de vie), rolls, pastries, chocolates and cakes; finally, corks are pulled from a few good bottles of various kinds.
At the winery, the grapes are immediately placed into two wooden basket presses, vintage 1920, maintained specifically for making eiswein, Selbach says. "They provide continuous, strong pressure - stronger than our standard, gentle, modern pneumatic presses. The pressure drops the temperature inside the huge ball of frozen grapes the way that snow packed to form a snowball becomes hard and icy under the pressure of one's hands.
"It takes mounting pressure to coax some liquid out of that mass. The harder the grapes are frozen, the longer it takes until the thick white liquid starts dripping in small trickles, eventually becoming a thin stream of thick white-yellow syrup smoothly and quietly flowing into the vat beneath the press.
"The refractometer gives a first indication about the sugar in the liquid, and later a sample is sent to the lab to gather exact data about sugar and acidity," Selbach says.
Analytically, a typical ice wine consists of two-thirds water and one-third alcohol, extract and sugar, says Karl Kaiser of Inniskillin. "Below six degrees Fahrenheit, there is no more juice coming out," he says. "Everything remains frozen in the berries. Our perfect harvest window is from 14 degrees Fahrenheit to 7 degrees Fahrenheit." The resulting quality and quantity is a function of temperature.
At some wineries, doors may be thrown open to admit the freezing air; sometimes presses remain outside under lowering, gray skies so that the fruit does not warm up, by even one degree.
After the super-concentrated grape juice is inoculated with yeast and is fermented very slowly - usually in stainless steel over two or three months, even more - the young wine will consist of deep sweetness and, ideally, razor-sharp acidity.
Ice wine is generally bottled soon after the fermentation ends, and can be drunk immediately. But while it is brisk and refreshing, and offers insight into what ideally should be a perfect high-wire fruit-sugar-acid balance, its youth tends to block detection of nuances, which can take years to unfold.
In Germany, national and regional statistical offices and agricultural organizations say they cannot furnish hard data on the quantity of eiswein produced yearly. It is unclear how many estates make it. "Apparently, the amount is simply too small to justify specific statistics," says Steffen Schindler, an executive at the German Wine Institute, a trade association in Mainz. "There are a few winegrowers who try to produce eiswein every year. A big majority do not take the risk. In between are those who produce an eiswein occasionally.
"As you can keep an eiswein for a very long time, these producers leave an eiswein on their price list until most of their bottles are sold, and then perhaps a few years later they will only think of trying it again," Schindler says. In a year with very low yields, he continues, "a winegrower will be less inclined to take the risk of producing eiswein because he needs all the grapes he can get to make 'normal' wines."
In 1982, eiswein became the sixth category of Qualitätswein mit Prädikat (Quality Wine With Special Attributes), a bracket of wines based on grape ripeness created by the far-reaching German wine law of 1971. To qualify as an eiswein, grape must needs to reach the minimum natural sugar levels of beerenausleses, which are 110 to 128 degrees Oechsle, depending on the region and grape variety.
Though pricey, eiswein no longer is exclusively a luxury beverage in Germany. It arrived in supermarkets in 2002 for the first time, though in small amounts. "This is due to the fact that 2002 was a very good year for eiswein, with comparatively high yields and early frosts," Schindler says. "In addition, there is a new acceptance of sweet or noble sweet wines. We have had a steady trend toward the consumption and production of dry wines since the mid-80s. Today people are getting more relaxed on this notion, and noble sweet wines are socially acceptable again."
In 1998, Hanno Zilliken of Forstmeister Geltz Zilliken, in the Saar, harvested four Riesling eisweins from the splendid Saarburger Rausch vineyard. This progression illustrates beautifully how deepening richness contributes to value and to rising prices:
On November 21, a temperature of 19 degrees Fahrenheit yielded a must weight of just under the minimum level of 110 degrees Oechsle for ice wine. The wine was offered as a spätlese at auction and sold for 30.25 euros (about $39 at the mid-January 2004 rate of exchange).
On November 22, with temperatures dropping from 17 to 15, the must weight rose to 120 Oechsle. The wine was offered as an auslese gold cap at auction and sold for 90.74 euros ($116).
On November 23, a temperature of 14 produced a must weight of 160 Oechsle. The wine went to the trade as an eiswein at 165 euros ($211).
On November 24, with temperatures dropping from 11 to 10, the must weight reached almost 180 Oechsle. (The residual sugar was nearly 240 grams per liter.) The wine was offered as an eiswein at auction and fetched 272.23 euros ($349).
All four 750-milliliter bottles show "light acacia honey, apricot and beeswax, with great acidity," Zilliken says.
As for cryoextraction, the North American method, The Oxford Companion to Wine (second edition) explains it this way: "Freshly picked grapes are held overnight in a special cold room at sub-zero temperatures . . . and then pressed immediately. The freezing point of grape must depends on its concentration of sugars, so only the less ripe grapes freeze. Pressing . . . therefore yields only the juice of the nonfrozen, ripest grapes . . . The colder the grapes are kept, the less but richer juice is obtained, and vice versa. The wine producer can therefore manipulate how much wine of what quality is made."
Perhaps America's best-known ice wine comes from Randall Grahm, the iconoclastic proprietor-wordsmith of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, California, whose Vin de Glacière sounds less seductive in translation: Wine of the Icebox.
A Grahm micro-monologue on Vin de Glacière offers insights into the judgments a winegrower faces when addressing competing nuances: "We have been waffling with this wine . . . between one style dominated by orange muscat and another dominated by muscat canelli. On the muscat continuum, canelli is relatively elegant and urbane - suggestive principally of white nectarine, Asian pear, spearmint and lychee . . . Orange muscat, dominant in the 2001 vintage, is a far more highly stylized, effusive, bling-bling peaches-and-pineapple variety . . . Orange muscat may be nominally less delicate than muscat canelli; however its aromatic potential is usually superior."
I asked Grahm (who, unlike too many California peers, prefers truth to spin when hit with dicey questions) if he thought there are discernible differences in flavor, character, quality and depth between cryo-based ice wines and those made using the natural method.
"We have tried the cryoextraction method of pressing, and then freezing the grape juice. It's a lot easier and more cost-effective," he replied. "Theoretically, this should have yielded a superior result than doing it the old-fashioned (in a relative sense) way: sticking the grapes in the freezer. In principle, freezing juice should have given us less potassium uptake (lower pH's), less phenolic extraction (less bitterness and tendency toward browning). With cryoextraction, the amount of skin contact can be precisely controlled. All in all, it should have worked better. Except that it didn't. For whatever reason, we seem to get better results the old-fangled way, but we're not so ancien monde that we wait for the grapes to freeze on the vine. That just ain't gonna happen around here."
In short, Grahm concedes, "The cryo wines just tasted simpler, thinner, lacking in meat, glycerol, what have you." John Schreiner makes the same point in his valuable, groundbreaking book Icewine: The Complete Story (Warwick, Toronto, 2001): "It is widely accepted that natural icewines are more refined, with nuanced flavors, than those made with artificial freezing. The layered flavors develop as grapes remain on the vines late into the year, or even into the next year."
The United States government backs the old-fangled position. It ruled that wine made from grapes frozen after the harvest may not be labeled ice wine. "Because 'ice wine' is a recognized term for wine made from grapes frozen on the vine, the use of this term is misleading to consumers if used on a label of wine made using methods such as cryoextraction, which simulates the properties of ice wine," it said.
In 2002, organizations representing Canadian, Austrian and German producers signed an agreement to set voluntary international standards for making natural ice wine. And in 2003, the Office International de la Vigne et du Vin, the Paris-based 47-member intergovernmental organization, endorsed this position when it prohibited wines made from artificially frozen grapes from being called ice wine, vin de glace or eiswein.
One practical result of Washington's action is that Bedell Cellars, a leading producer on the North Fork of maritime-climate Long Island, could no longer woo customers with Eis, its successful ice wine. Kip Bedell, the winemaker, renamed it Late-Harvest Riesling. (The wine was always predominantly riesling, sometimes with gewürztraminer added.)
Another typical outcome is that non-vintage Vintner's Pride Finale, Bin 1301, an ice wine made from refrigerated sauvignon blanc and gewürztraminer grapes by Pellegrini Vineyards, a Bedell neighbor, is not identified as such on the bottle.
Ravishing or not, ice wines are not runaway best-sellers in the United States. Sam's Wine and Spirits, Chicago's biggest wine retailer and one of the nation's largest, sells about 40 ice wines, depending on availability (80 percent in half-bottles, 20 percent in full bottles). "We do not have an ice wine section," says Todd Hess, the wine director.
"We have the wines organized with other dessert wines, and these are arranged by country," Hess says. "In the case of Canada, the only dessert wines we carry are ice wines. Inniskillin pretty much dominates the category. Nice packaging and a lot of time and effort for marketing. Riesling is the most popular varietal."
Sales from 2001 through 2003 were flat, Hess says. "Fifty bucks for a half-bottle of dessert wine is a tough sell in our declining economy. I expect they will pick up now that the impression is that things are getting better."
Who buys ice wines? "The 30-somethings or the 60-somethings," Hess says. "The 60-somethings go for the Germans; the 30s, for the Canadians."
Hess does not drink them ("my wife, Veronica Hastings, does not like them"), he says. "I generally prefer Sauternes or the incredible Austrian wines of Kracher. I love eiswein when it gets older; young, they tend to be a bit one-dimensional."
In Vienna, Christian Petz, the chef at Restaurant Coburg, in the new, luxurious Palais Coburg Hotel Residenz, is a fan of Alois Kracher, in the Burgenland region. (While cooking at Vienna's celebrated Meinl am Graben, Petz was named chef of the year in 2002 by the Austrian Gault-Millau.)
"Kracher certainly is one of the best eiswein producers in Austria," Petz says. "He understands perfectly the difference between the heavily botrytised beerenausleses and trockenbeerenausleses, and the exotic, more fruit-driven eisweins."
In Petz's judgment, Schlossweingut Graf Hardegg, in the Weinviertel, "produces brilliant eisweins from riesling with a very fresh, clean bouquet that brings to mind extremely cold but clear winter days in northern Austria." These eisweins, he believes, "are not sticky but quite lean, elegantly structured and very, very impressive. Toni Bodenstein of Weingut Prager makes fantastic eisweins (though rarely) from riesling, with great fruit brilliance and even the terroir character of the Wachau primary-rock soils," Petz continues. "The wines are nearly severe, high in acidity and have fantastic longevity."
The Palais Coburg's wine director, Karl Seiser, has placed eisweins from these producers on the restaurant's list, along with eisweins from Emmerich Knoll and F. X. Pichler, both in the Wachau region, and from Hardegg.
Avoiding heavy desserts like chocolate cake, for eiswein, Petz prefers desserts "with a nice acidity that are focused on fruit." They include a passion fruit soufflé with lime foam, a quince strudel and a rhubarb meringue tart. In Ontario, winegrowers recommend ice wine with fresh fruit; young, soft cheeses; seared foie gras; and desserts that are less sweet. The wine should be served well chilled. If carefully recorked and refrigerated, its pep should last for several weeks.
Eiswein even has its own stemware. In 2000, the Austrian glassmaker Georg Riedel released a delicate glass contoured to offer access to the idiosyncrasies of eiswein, late-harvest and botrytised wines. (In Riedel's Vinum Extreme series, the 10-ounce, $28 glass, with a bowl shaped like a playing-card diamond, is almost nine inches tall.)
But you cannot use the glass for eiswein from Alsace, because, while riesling is the "king of grapes" there, the climate does not provide an ice palace. Marc Beyer, who runs the house of Léon Beyer, in Eguisheim, says that the wines of Alsace "do not have the acidity balance for eiswein" and that eiswein has no official status. He has heard that a "few marginal small producers" have on occasion made "so-called eisweins." Beyer's pride lies in Alsace's special contributions to sweet-wine culture: wines labeled vendange tardive (late harvest) and sélection de grains nobles (individually picked grapes with noble rot), the equivalents, respectively, of German auslese and beerenauslese.
Although I prefer German eisweins above all, I turned to Austria for the year's peak celebratory moment. My thoughts and feelings about eiswein crystallized in an e-mail sent to Alois Kracher at the dawning of 2004 about his blend of welschriesling, chardonnay and pinot gris:
"I thought it would please you to learn that the very last wine we drank at a dinner at home on New Year's Eve was your 2001 Eiswein Cuvée. This was a deliberate culinary and symbolic act. The eiswein was made in heaven for the Roquefort cheese dessert. But, more important, when the old year reaches its height, the right thing to do is to drink a wine that matches that height, artistically. When we consider the condition and harvest date of the grapes, your eiswein contains in its sweetness the age of the vanishing year, and in its acidity the vitality of the newly arriving one."
Tasting BAR
White ice wines, the easy-to-like majority, share traits. Many pander to the palate; others tease the intellect. The colors shade from pale white to brass to gold to Cognac. Honey, tropical fruits and bread dough range through the bouquets and flavors. Sweetness and dryness mingle and chase each other. Soft textures lay down viscous coatings on the palate; finishes are long and clinging. A tang is expectable. Alcohol tends to register 10 percent or less. The acid may be appetite-building, the sugar appetite-fulfilling. And some reds seem gimmicky and trivial, evoking pop supermarket fruit beverages.
The ice wines listed here were standouts among 35 sampled; none were tasted blind. Unless otherwise noted, all were made from vine-frozen grapes and all are found in clear or frosty half-bottles (375 milliliters); most Canadian wines came from the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario. The tight corks, in small mouths and often topped by hardened-wax disks, yield best to a Screwpull.
All the aroma and flavor effects were heightened and clarified by using Riedel's sturdy, Austrian-made ice wine glass, which concentrates and funnels them efficiently to the nostrils and palate (see main article).
The first-rate examples of Gewürztraminer suggest that potentially that grape has more dignity as ice wine than Vidal, a staple of the genre, which, even when most winning, is obvious.
Casa Larga, 2002 Fiori delle Stelle Vidal, Finger Lakes, New York - $26: Full of pizazz, depth, assertive flavor and acidity, a hint of nuts. Score: 88
Chateau Ste. Michelle, 2002 Reserve White Riesling, Columbia Valley, Washington - $32: A great sweet white, exemplary; off-the-charts viscosity, low-key, at once refined and sexy, shows the grace of a prima ballerina. Score: 97
Helmut Hexamer, 2001 Sobernheimer Marbach Riesling, Nahe, Germany - $84: Earthy, simple and for everyday rather than special-occasion use; a confection, a quaffer. Score: 87
Inniskillin, 2002 Oak-Aged Vidal, Ontario - $80: Grapy nose, ambrosial, heavy on palate, sugary, notes of crème brûlée and brioche; a little goes a long way. Score: 86
Inniskillin, 1999 Dornfelder, Ontario - $70: An ambitious, interesting sweet red with gravitas, opaque, densely jammy, almost liquid
chocolate, satisfying. A curiosity. Score: 86
Inniskillin, 2001 Sparkling Vidal Ice Wine, Ontario - $80: Tiny bubbles, syrupy, full-bodied, lively. Inventive, a jewel. Score: 93
Inniskillin, 1999 Chenin Blanc, Ontario - $70: Sumptuous, a liquid honeycomb, super-concentrated, redolent of prunes, sexy, hits you like an Emeril Lagasse "Bam!" Score: 86
Jackson-Triggs, 2001 Riesling, Ontario - $50: Delicate, marzipan in flavor, candied fruit reminiscent of Christmas panettone, subtleties of flavor, lovely balance, ingratiating. Score: 90
Jackson-Triggs, 2002 Gewürztraminer, Ontario - $50: Glossy texture, light as a cirrus cloud, understated, lychee notes, brings after-dinner mints to mind. Idiosyncratic. Score: 92
Joseph Phelps, 2002 Eisrébe (Scheurebe plus muscat), Napa Valley, California - $23: Charming, focused, light, redolent of grapefruit and tropical fruit, quaffable. A masterly example of ice wine made from refrigerated grapes. (June release date) Score: 96
J.u.H.A. Strub, 2001 Niersteiner Paterberg, Riesling, Rhinehessen, Germany - $153: Luscious, elegant, lean, piquant, volumes of lip- and palate-coating glycerol. Score: 96
Kiona, 2002 Red Mountain Chenin Blanc, Washington - $27: A sumptuous calorie bomb, totally tangy, hints of peanut butter in flavor, totally viscous, pour over vanilla ice cream. Score: 94
Paradise Ranch, 2000 Riesling, British Columbia - $55: Elegant, mango notes, vibrant, doughy, zingy, quaffable, welcoming. Score: 95
Paradise Ranch, 2000 Chardonnay, British Columbia - $70: Ambrosial, a fruit bowl, doughy and Champagne-like, sappy, swamps the palate. Score: 93
Royal DeMaria, 2000 Gewürztraminer, Ontario - $266: Cushiony, shows depth, balance, understatement and equilibrium. Lovely. Score: 93
Royal DeMaria, 2000 Chardonnay, Ontario - $190: Flirtatious, candy-like, caramel, nuanced, low-key, invites refills. A bauble. Score: 90
Selbach-Oster, 2002 Zeltinger Himmelreich, Riesling, Mosel, Germany - $239: Deeply fruity nose, light as a feather, Champagne-like, refined, expressive, mouth-watering. Score: 96
St. Urbans-Hof, 2002 Ockfener Bockstein, Riesling, Mosel, Germany - $75: Peaches, apricots, filigree, light-bodied, low-key, beautiful balance. Score: 95
Triebaumer, 1999 Furmint, Rust, Burgenland, Austria - $42: Exotic bouquet akin to dried pineapple, marmalade notes in flavor, charged acidity favors use as apéritif. Enthralling. Score: 92
Weinlauben Kracher, 2001 Eiswein Cuvée (welschriesling, chardonnay, pinot gris), Burgenland, Austria - $38: Ethereal bouquet, light as a soufflé, lean, modest, seamless, citric bite. Graced by an artist's touch. Score: 96
Howard G. Goldberg, a wine critic at The New York Times, is author of All About Wine Cellars, a book that is part of The Complete Wine Cellar System kit (Running Press, 2003).
the Producers
In Ontario and British Columbia, the Vintners Quality Alliance, in effect Canada's appellation contrôlée organization, regulates ice wine production.
The most interesting Ontario producers include Cave Spring Cellars, Château de Charmes, Henry of Pelham, Hillebrand, Inniskillin, Jackson-Triggs, Konzelmann, Magnotta, Marynissen, Pelee Island Winery, Peller, Pillitteri and Reif. In British Columbia, look for Gehringer Brothers, Gray Monk, Mission Hill, Paradise Ranch and Sumac Ridge.
A catalog of Germany's leading eiswein weingüter (wine estates), though by no means comprehensive, would include these estates (listed alphabetically by region), whose wines are not always easy to find:
Hesse: Staatsweingut Bergstrasse (Hessiche Bergstrasse's state domaine). Mosel: Grans-Fassian, Max Ferd. Richter, Selbach-Oster, St. Urbans-Hof. Nahe: Schlossgut Diel, Hermann Dönhoff, Kruger-Rumpf, Schneider. Rheingau: Georg Breuer, Johannishof, Peter Jakob Kühn, Franz Künstler, Joseph Leitz, Schloss Schönborn, Robert Weil. Rheinhessen: Gunderloch, Louis Guntrum, Strub. Ruwer: Karlsmuhle, Maximin Grünhaus. Saar: Egon Müller-Scharzhof, Forstmeister Geltz-Zilliken.
If anyone knows Austria's eiswein scene it's Peter Moser, editor in chief of Falstaff, the authoritative Austrian wine magazine, and author of The Ultimate Austrian Wine Guide (Falstaff Publications). A second edition, containing 300 producers and emphasizing the 2002 and 2003 vintages, is to be released in June.
Asked to recommend top Austrian eiswein producers, Moser tilts toward those that are export-oriented. Some of his suggestions, including eiswein and, in some cases, vineyards, follow (by region, alphabetically):
Donauland: Familie Bauer, Grossriedenthal, 2002 Blauer Burgunder and 2002 Grüner Veltliner. Kamptal: Schloss Gobelsburg, 2001 Grüner Veltliner. Kremstal: Dr. Unger, 2001 Sprinzenberg. Styria: Lackner-Tinnacher, 2001 Riesling, and Alois Gross, 2001 Gewürztraminer. Weinviertel: Schlossweingut Graf Hardegg, 2001 and 2002 Rieslings; Weinrieder, 2002 Riesling Schneiderberg vineyard.
Even if some of these vintages are not findable, Moser's list of producers offers an index of probable quality in future vintages.
In the Finger Lakes region in west-central New York, the most prominent ice wine producers are Casa Larga, Fulkerson, Hermann J. Wiemer, Hunt Country, Lakewood, Sheldrake Point and Wagner. (Casa Larga's 2002 Fiori delle Stelle Vidal was voted New York's best dessert wine at the 2003 Wine & Food Classic, an annual contest sponsored by the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, a trade association.)
In Washington, fewer than 3,000 cases of ice wine are made under suitable conditions from chenin blanc, gewürztraminer, riesling, sémillon and muscat. The producers include Chateau Ste. Michelle, Claar Cellars, Covey Run, Gold Digger Cellars, Dunham Cellars, Hyatt Vineyards and Kiona.
Key importers and distributors of German and Austrian eisweins are Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, New York; Vin Divino, Chicago; and Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, California.
- HGG
Sweets for the Sweet
Ice wine easily and elegantly solos as dessert. The challenge is serving it with dessert. To avoid any slip-ups, the newly minted Wild Sweets - Exotic Dessert & Wine Pairings ($39.95; Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley), serves up deft matches in the confounding realm of sweets for the sweet.
Authored by Canadian chefs Dominique and Cindy Duby, the recipes are tempting and the advice astute. One of themore arresting compositions is "Red Curry Squash Flan" washed down with Cabernet Franc ice wine; its polar opposite might be the all-in-one "Icewine Gelée with Coconut Milk Sabayon"
Celebrating its April 8 U.S. release, Wild Sweets and its authors will be fêted by Chef Charlie Trotter, who wrote the foreword, at a book party on April 29 at his eponymous Chicago restaurant. - Claudia Conlon
