Drink more Ice Wine (Eiswein) before you die! Why?
It's the most concentrated, intensely sweet, pure wine out there. Like delicious alcoholic grape juice. But, it's really, really, hard to make so we need to drink more so they make more!
Ice Wine isn’t something you can just make anywhere. It takes extreme conditions, good fortune and nerves of steel. Hence, you won’t see it crowding supermarket shelves. This is a special wine made in small quantities in only a few places on earth.
Intensely sweet and concentrated, Ice Wine is a deliciously pure wine made from grapes harvested while they are frozen on the vine. They’re quickly pressed so that the water crystals remain frozen in the press. The resulting juice is more like a thick syrup of highly concentrated grape sugars, acid, and flavor. Obviously, pressing frozen grapes yields a very small quantity of juice so there’s no cheap ice wines.
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| Frozen grapes ready to make Ice Wine | © istockphoto.com / MaxBaumann |
Likewise, leaving grapes on the vine long enough for temperatures to drop to below freezing is a risky business so bottle prices need to be high to make the endeavor worthwhile to the vigneron. To state the obvious, you need a predictably cold climate to even think about making this sort of wine. Germany and Austria both excel in this style of wine, hence this style of wine is often called Eiswein (German for Ice Wine!). Canada has also emerged as a significant producer of Ice Wine. Thanks to their reliably freezing winters, the Canadians have turned ice wine into a delicious specialty of their wine industry.
For more info check out https://winecountryontario.ca/icewine/
These wines all about youthful freshness and purity so drinking them while they are young.