Turn Up The Cold: Ice Wine

It’s easy to think about bringing locally grown foods to the table in August when lively farmers markets beckon and roadside stands are bursting with everything fresh and wonderful. This month? Not so easy. It calls for creative thinking to keep that local theme burning during the wintertime. So wrap yourself in a blanket, stoke the fire and pour a glass of Ohio ice wine and let’s think. Hmmmm.

In the wide world of wine, Mother Nature has picked just a few locations on the globe, among them Canada, Germany, Austria and Ohio gifting them with an agricultural monopoly to produce ice wine in its natural form. Next to the grapes, proper measures of frigid cold and ice are a must.

One sip of a luscious ice wine and you'll learn to love winter.

Ice wine is a unique dessert wine produced from ripe grapes that have been left on the vines to meet the first hard freeze of winter. Vidal blanc are the flagship grapes for making Ohio ice wine, although Riesling and Cabernet Franc varieties are also found. Vidal’s tough skins will see the grapes through multiple freezes and thaws in the winter leading up to precise moment when the mercury drops between 14 and 18 and the grapes freeze rock hard—a shotgun start to a dead-of-night harvest which has to be conducted immediately and quickly before the rising sun threatens to soften the clusters. The vines are stripped of these golden marbles, often by moonlight or headlights, and trucked to the winery’s unheated pressroom. The sugars and solids in the grapes do not freeze but the water does, so when it’s pressed frozen, shards of ice are driven out leaving behind a dense juice with a high concentration of sugar. Bottled, enjoyed young, and sporting a price tag that suggests something special, it’s ice wine and it’s all about local.

About a dozen wineries throughout Ohio, from as far north as Firelands Winery in Sandusky and as far south as Valley Vineyards near Cincinnati, produce the sweet, complex wine. In the Grand River Valley region, there are six wineries straddling the Grand River throughout Geauga, Trumbull and Ashtabula counties who work independently of one another to produce ice wine. Collectively they have formed Winegrowers of Grand River Valley and they are working to put the focus on their exclusive product, particularly suited for this particular region.

“The valley creates a funnel which concentrates the air coming off Lake Erie,” Larry Laurello of Laurello Vineyards (Geneva) described to me from his cell phone as he enjoyed a winter retreat (a.k.a. golf and sipping wine) in San Diego. “In the spring, the air off the lake is cooler which gives the grapes a slower start and protects them from frost,” he said. “In the winter, the lake air is warmer giving the grapes more time to ripen in the field.” Cool nights in the valley also help to slow the maturation of the grapes. “If the grapes form too quickly, the sugar rises too high and the flavor just isn’t there,” he explained.

This year’s ice wine harvest through the Grand River Valley region was conducted on December 17th and Gene Siegel of South River Vineyards (Geneva) prediction for this vintage is promising. “Normally when we pick, our gloves get sticky,” he noticed. “This year, they were dry which is perfect. The grapes had a beautiful range of colors and the sugar tested high (44 Brix),” he reported. “It’s the best yield of juice we’ve had in nine years.” After six months in the bottle, Gene anticipates fresh, vibrant flavors from his ice wine, perhaps light hints of lemon or banana.

Ohio’s Grand Valley Ice Wine producers sell every bottle they produce with the majority sold in Ohio. Larry Laurello is always surprised that there are many ice wine fans from Ohio who turn elsewhere (Canada or New York) for their ice wine.

“Californians knows all about our ice wines and would love to have more,” he said. “It’s like having the lake in your backyard and never jumping in. It’s right there! Why not enjoy it?”

Ice wine is easy to love when you follow these tips.