Ice Wines - Difficult to Make But Oh So Good to Drink

 by Dave Zuchowski

            Ice Wines are one category of dessert wines that seem to intrigue many people. The thought of winemakers going out into subfreezing temperatures to pick shriveled, raisin-like grapes off the vine hours before sunrise in the cold winter months seems to have a special allure for romantically-inclined wine lovers. Many less adventurous, less motivated souls would probably ask why even bother?

            "Taste," answers Robert Mazza, the Erie winemaker who's been making luscious, intensely-flavored Ice Wines since 1984. "While other dessert wines certainly have their place, most of them can't stack up to Ice Wine, which has a truly unique flavor. I like to think of drinking Ice Wines as drinking liquid gold."

            Delicious though they may be, getting the flavor-packed grapes to harvest on an annual basis can be rather tricky business. Mazza estimates that in the past twenty years, he's managed to bottle only between fifteen or sixteen vintages of Ice Wine. Sometimes flocks of birds, which can devour a crop in a single afternoon, pose a problem. But mostly, being blessed the right weather conditions determines whether or not an Ice Wine will be produced in any one year.

            Mazza, who makes his Ice Wine from Vidal grapes and sells it for $34.95 for a 375 ml. bottle, harvests his fruit when the temperature drops into the low teens. That way, when the grapes go into the press, they produce a highly concentrated juice whose water content has largely been left behind in the form of a block of ice. What remains is a liquid concentrate whose sugar content averages out to around 37 Brix, almost double the amount of that which produces a dry table wine.

            "Ice Wines are the result of two processes - leaving the grapes on the vine long enough till they dehydrate and crushing them when much of their water content has turned to ice by sub-freezing temperatures," he says.

            In an average year, Mazza will leave about ten tons of Vidal grapes on the vines during the fall harvest season in the hope of making Ice Wine. By the time he picks the crop in December, the yield can drop to around 4,000 to 5,000 pounds.

            "Usually, one ton of grapes will yield 165 to 190 gallons of table wine," he says. "The same amount of grapes, if left on the vine, will yield only 40 to 50 gallons of Ice Wine."

            When conditions are just right, Mazza and a half dozen workers will go out into the vineyards at 5 in the morning and harvest the entire crop before sun up, using his truck headlights as a light source. All the grapes have to be picked by hand, because they're so tenuously attached to their stems that machines would knock off most of the fruit off the vines before it could be collected.

            Normally, grape pickers use a pair of shears to harvest wine grapes. But, because  Ice Wine grapes are such easy plucking, harvesters can readily pull them off the vines with their hands, although they do have to wear gloves and sometimes work in two or three feet of snow.

            "Harvesting Ice Wine grapes is a double edged sword," says Mazza. "It's something we both look forward to and dread at the same time."

      &nb