#114 Ice Wine Report: 12/13: 11 Degrees

And we are keeping them on the vine until we see further de-hydration. Harvest will likely be in the middle of January next year.

Riesling fruit under three layers of netting. As we described in Substack #62 and Substack #65, the Ice Wine harvest is not a guarantee. For the last two years, deer tore through our netting and began to eat our grapes. To prevent that, this year we have three layers of nets, and we are checking regularly to make sure the nets hold.

Very few of us in the Finger Lakes make Ice Wine. First, it is work to purchase and install protective netting; second, the process to make this dessert wine is difficult and requires experienced winemaking; and third, because we get so little juice from the de-hydrated fruit, the final product is expensive.

The grapes that would normally make three bottles of conventional wine, will produce only one, half-bottle of Ice Wine. That is why Ice Wine made from de-hydrated fruit left out in the vineyard is so expensive.

But it is also delicious. There is nothing quite like it; a dessert wine made from concentrated Riesling juice, fermented to about 9 percent alcohol which leaves the level of residual sugar around 20 percent. Because of the high sugar content, Ice wine will age for more than 100 years. As it ages, its bright fruit flavors evolve into flavors of dried fruit and nuts.

You can’t really appreciate Ice Wine until you have tried it. Earlier this year, a restaurant in New York City said it would be holding a $495/plate dinner at the Aspen Food and Wine Festival in Aspen, Colorado. They wanted to feature our Ice Wine with the dessert course.

“Would you be willing to donate enough Ice Wine to serve 200 people?” we were asked.

Donate?

That is a lot of Ice Wine to donate. The restaurant that was asking is one of the top ten restaurants in New York. We hemmed and hawed, and finally agreed to ship the wine.

Back in 2021 our Riesling Ice Wine was named the Top Dessert Wine made in New York. That was a very good, Riesling Ice Wine. And we saved quite a few bottles, thinking that it would become even better as it aged. The only vintage with a sufficient number of bottles set aside to serve 200 people in Colorado was that one.

Off they went.

Time will tell if the decision to “donate” that wine to serve a well-heeled audience in Colorado made sense. Most of those diners, we concluded, would be tasting an Ice Wine from the Finger Lakes for the first time at that dinner. And you can’t appreciate such a thing until you taste it.

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Take a look back at how we felt in 2022 when we discovered that deer had torn our nets and dined on our Riesling fruit. It had been a very hot and dry year, and there was not a lot of vegetation available for the deer to eat in the winter. They were hungry and aggressive.