It involves dousing each bottle with yeast to make bubbles, then removing the yeast once the bubbles form. Johnson Estate was the first winery in North America to use this method to produce a sparking ice wine in a bottle, as opposed to in a tank, as other wineries have done. “We make a third, very rare sparking rosé ice wine using the method champenoise,” she added. They make their ice wine from Vidal Blanc and Chambourcin grapes. “Johnson Estate Winery, on the Lake Erie Wine Country Trail, has been producing true ice wines, made with grapes frozen on the vine, for over 20 years,” said Jennifer Johnson, who runs the winery with her husband, Fred. Another half-dozen or so wineries on the Lake Erie Wine Country Trail, along Lake Erie in Chautauqua County and Erie County, Pennsylvania, also produce ice wine. The climate in Western New York is also conducive to ice wine, with a half-dozen wineries on the Niagara Wine Trail in Niagara, Orleans and Monroe counties producing it. “The elixir of the grapes is what is pressed out.” Only a drop or two are extracted from each grape, resulting in a very sweet wine, with a sweetness level of 18-20 percent depending on the vintage. “The grapes are frozen as solid as a glass marble,” said Jennifer Johnson from Johnson Estate Winery in Westfield. Ice wine tends to be more expensive than regular wines, since in addition to the hand-picking required, you get only about one-fourth the wine that you’d yield if you had harvested those grapes before they froze. I think the temperature had reached 17 degrees.” “We had to stop around 10 a.m., when the sun started to warm up the grapes. “We started picking early in the morning on a bitter cold day in December it was 15 degrees,” Burdo told me. Stephanie Schuckers Burdo, publisher of Edible Western NY, helped with the harvest last season. Winery farm workers are joined by family, friends, and other interested parties to help out. Ice wine harvest requires many hands, sort of like an Amish barn raising. Once the grapes are completely frozen, usually in December or January, they are manually harvested and pressed. In the fall, grapes that will be used for ice wine are covered with netting to protect them from birds. While any variety of grapes can be used, those that ripen later in the season, such as Vidal Blanc and Riesling, are a better choice. The highly concentrated juice is press from the frozen grapes, and then fermented slowly to produce an intensely sweet and concentrated wine that is like liquid honey.Ice wine-that sweet liquid libation, the perfect dessert wine to enjoy after an evening of dining, is oh so pricey, but oh so delicious! What exactly is ice wine, how is it made, and most importantly, why is it so much more expensive than regular wine?īy definition, ice wine can only be made from grapes that have ripened and frozen naturally on the vine. This allows the water in the grapes to freeze while the sugars don’t, so the highly ripened grapes are between 33 – 36 degrees brix (a measurement of sugar) when they are harvested. Then the grapes are hand-picked at the winery vineyards in mid-December when the grapes are completely frozen and temperatures are between 10 – 12 degrees. A select portion of our vines is set aside for the fruit to continue ripening throughout the fall. Story: Ice wine is a traditional dessert wine produced from grapes that have been frozen while still on the vine, and our Wisconsin winters give us the perfect conditions to make a genuine Ice Wine. Serve with: Cheesecake, pecans, extra special desserts Production Method: Grapes pressed frozen Long, slow, cool fermentation Pepin, estate-grown and harvested frozen, by hand
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