Ice wine a rare treat made from naturally frozen grapes

By Thomas P. Skeen
Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

	THOMAS P. SKEEN / WALLA WALLA UNION-BULLETIN Covey Run vintner Kerry Norton checks on frozen riesling grapes during an early-morning ice wine harvest at a vineyard near Benton City.
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A layer of fog blotted out what little celestial light there was in the frozen night, plunging the vineyard at Oasis Farms into an inky darkness.

It's bone-chilling cold at 4:30 a.m. in the Yakima Valley near Benton City. Earlier that night, around midnight on Halloween, the temperature had dropped to 15 degrees, freezing several acres of riesling grapes left hanging after the fall harvest for Covey Run Winery's regular table wines.

Despite the cold, there is a fever of action breaking the stillness.

Covey Run vintner Kerry Norton, harvest supervisor Joel Quiñones and his crew of about a half-dozen workers have been busy since 3 a.m., taking advantage of an infrequent alignment of factors that allows them to harvest for a dessert apéritif called ice wine.

Lights pierce the darkness, silhouetting rows of vines over a rise 100 yards to the north. Then comes the sound of approaching engines. Soon the shapes of two farm tractors working in tandem appear.

One pulls a loudly buzzing mechanical harvester that spews out leaves and vine detritus back onto the vineyard, while the frozen grapes it collects are fed into an overhead chute that drops them into a hopper the other tractor is towing two rows over.

The drivers of each rig are bundled up. Only their eyes and lower foreheads are exposed to the numbing air.

Nature rules the harvest

Although this Saturday morning belies notions people have about the romance of winemaking, it doesn't get much better for vintners who produce ice wine.

THOMAS P. SKEEN / WALLA WALLA UNION-BULLETIN The vineyard crew works in subfreezing temperatures early in the morning to pick frozen grapes for a 2003 Covey Run Winery ice wine.

A sweet, highly floral, fruity, flavor-packed and honey-textured dessert wine first made in Europe's colder climes, it is more commonly made in North America in Canada and upper Great Lakes states.

It's a wine in which the first step, picking the grapes, is entirely up to nature. Taking that step depends on whether temperatures fall to at least 18 degrees. That's the point where water in grapes freeze, separating from concentrated sugars and acids which are still fluid enough to be pressed out and the ice crystals left behind.

On this night, nature is cooperating with Norton, whose winery has been able to make ice wine only twice over the previous four years.

It's early enough in the season that birds and other foragers haven't gleaned wintering vines to where the time and expense of harvesting grapes is not worth the yield. The sudden arctic chill arrived before the first, milder frosts, which begin the process of dehydrating grapes and eroding their fresher varietal and flavor characteristics, Norton says.

"Grapes can go south really quick with rot and migratory birds eating them," Norton says.

So, dressed in a warm vest and a heavy wool shirt and wearing gloves, he was in the vineyard in the early morning hours to give the go-ahead to harvest. He knew he might not get this chance again with this vintage.

"Last year we picked on Halloween night, when it was 10 degrees, and it was the coldest night of the whole winter," he says.

By 6 a.m. as the first hint of daylight appears over hills to the east, the harvest is finished and the bins filled with grapes are hauled by truck back to the winery near Grandview.

Quiñones, wearing a sweatshirt with a hood pulled over his ball cap, reports that 4½ acres were picked. Norton translates the yield to about 25 tons, enough to make about 1,900 cases of ice wine. The wine will come in 375-ml bottles called splits, which contain half the amount of a regular-size wine bottle.

The price? Probably $21 per bottle retail, he says.

Pressing an iceberg

Although Canada, particularly the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, is gaining recognition for its ice wines, few Washington wineries attempt making it and most of those that do produce low volumes.

	THOMAS P. SKEEN / WALLA WALLA UNION-BULLETIN Covey Run Winery vintner Kerry Norton, left, confers with picking crew supervisor Joel Quiñones on the progress of an early-morning harvest of frozen riesling grapes, which will be used in making ice wine.

Chateau Ste. Michelle (which picked enough during the recent freeze to make 645 cases), Kiona Vineyards Winery (which picked enough for 300 cases) and Covey Run are among the more consistent producers when conditions are right.

But rounding up pickers on short notice and working in the cold is only half the battle.

Working with frozen grapes is hard on expensive cellar machinery, and a breakdown can affect production schedules for other wines.

"It takes a pretty tremendous press to make a good ice wine, one that can apply maybe 60 (pounds per square inch)," says Mike Buckmiller, winemaker for Gold Digger Cellars, a small winery founded three years ago in Oroville near the Canada border. "And I don't think my press will go that high."

Although conditions for ice wine harvesting come early and often in his vineyards, he says he's held off on making any more since the 2001 vintage, until he can afford a dedicated press. "I didn't want to risk blowing out a (press bladder) with things to still do here."

Norton learned the hard way last year, when he made a semillon ice wine. Even with a large, $100,000 stainless-steel press, he still had problems.

"We got the juice, but when we looked inside the press, there was a 7-ton iceberg left that had been rolling around" and damaging the machinery, he says.

But even if juice is extracted without problems, the next step — fermentation — can also be tricky.

A special yeast must be used that can stand up to the highly concentrated sugar and acid levels without dying before the alcohol conversion is finished, Norton says. It's a much longer process and requires more monitoring than regular wines, whose grapes are picked with sugar levels about two-thirds the level of the same varietal harvested later for ice wine.

Is it worth all the aggravation?

To Norton, it is.

"Ice wine is getting hot, and the supply has not kept up with the demand," he says.

Kiona Vineyards Winery vintner Scott Williams says he's made an ice wine nearly every year for more than a decade as a matter of pride.

"It makes pretty cool wines," he says. "It's really neat to pour wines for people and watch their eyes grow big and hear them say, 'Wow.' "Thomas P. Skeen: 509-525-3300 or e-mail at tskeen@ubnet.com.

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