Winemakers chill out

CAMBRIA — It’s much easier to understand why ice wine costs $40 or more for a small bottle when you’re standing for a couple of hours in the middle of a frozen field on a morning when the Buffalo Bills would beg to play indoors.

That is what runs through your mind as you shiver and snip away at the clusters of frozen grapes in a Niagara Landing vineyard on ice wine harvesting day — a relatively new phenomenon in Niagara County.

Conditions must be right for you to be here. Before grapes are prime for picking, according to winemakers, the temperature needs to be 17 degrees Fahrenheit or lower for three straight days.

The Germans say below 19 degrees is the requirement, and the two Niagara County wineries involved in the process for just their second year say it is 18.

But why quibble when, as Joan Rivers would say, you can’t feel your face?

It’s been a good 10 degrees lower than that for most of the last three days here anyway.

Tom and Maria Kane of East Amherst were among the 50 or so volunteers who gave up a Saturday snuggled indoors to help Niagara Landing further nudge its chilled nose into a business dominated for two decades by wineries in southern Ontario.

Not that they were revved up about Saturday morning’s itinerary.

“Maybe they’ll be done by the time we get there,” Tom said as the couple sat in the open back of a Ford F-150 pickup that took them about a half-mile off Lower Mountain Road toward four rows of Vidal blanc grapes.

The Kanes had their imaginations on something bigger: Mother’s Day weekend, when brother and sister Peter A. Smith and Jackie Smith Connelly, owners of Niagara Landing, will show their appreciation to the harvesters by hosting a special party for the group when the wine is ready to enjoy.

“We love ice wine,” Tom Kane said. “Why else would we be here? We have a dozen or so bottles at home.”

And what is ice wine? Its flavor has tones of apricot, pineapple and banana, and it smells of honey. It’s sweet, but crisp, with a clean finish, and meant to be sipped and swirled around in the mouth in small quantities, like other dessert wines. Thank goodness, considering the price.

The four wineries that serve ice wine on the Niagara Wine Trail charge $40 for a 375-milliliter bottle, one half the size of their other varieties, which cost about half the price, or less.

The volunteers Saturday met at the winery on Van Dusen Road at 7:30 a. m. for coffee and instructions. The temperature outside had barely cracked zero.

“We’ve got a nice little breeze, so you might sweat today,” Smith said with a smile.

Then it was off for Lower Mountain Road, as well as a vineyard beside the winery, where Catawba grapes awaited. About two acres of grapes were all that remained of a 40-acre swath that had been stripped of its other wine grapes in the fall.

Those that remained were shadows of their former selves, shriveled like large raisins, frozen, but packed with acid and much more sugar than those cut from the vine weeks ago. Lightweight plastic nets, pinched together at the bottom by plastic ties, prevented the clusters from falling to the ground, and protected them from deer, birds, skunks and raccoons in search of a rare winter treat.

Roughly three tons were picked, taken back to the winery in plastic bins and squeezed hard by a 1940s-vintage “bladder press,” a cylindrical drum that normally churns out a steady stream of grape juice. On Saturday, the juice trickled down slowly. Winemaker Domenic Carisetti hoped that when all was said and done, there would be as many as 200 gallons of sweet, intensely flavored juice, out of 10,000 gallons of wine Niagara Landing expects to produce from the season’s now-completed harvest.

The entire process on Saturday took place outdoors, and the conditions were part of what helps explain why it costs so much for a bottle of ice wine. The need to protect and handpick the grapes, the frigid conditions, and the extremely low yield are all part of the economics.

Four to six tons of wine grapes usually come off an acre of vines, compared with about 1.5 tons per acre for ice wine. One vine can produce a small glass of ice wine, Connelly estimated, and a full bottle of other types.

Niagara Landing, one of a half-dozen wineries in Cambria, and Schulze Winery in Burt share the distinction of being the first wineries on the Niagara Wine Trail to set aside part of their grape crop for ice wine. Leonard Oakes Estate Winery, in Medina, harvested its first ice wine crop as this weekend approached. Carisetti is the winemaker for all three.

“New York is a great [wine] state. We can grow it all,” said Carisetti, a corporate winemaker in central and Western New York for 35 years. It’s a job he described as “99 percent grunt work and one percent glory.”

Arrowhead Spring Vineyards, also in Cambria, has seven acres in mostly red wine. It buys Vidal blanc grapes from a grower in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. and has them pressed in a Canadian field before the sweet juice comes to the U.S. winery and is fermented in stainless steel for 18 months, about three times the typical length. It's a set-up that has worked well for Arrowhead, which got a 90 rating on its ice wine last year from Wine Spectator, a key wine publication. It was third-highest rating ever for a wine produced or partly produced in New York state. Niagara Landing just learned Friday that Wine Enthusiast, a similar publication, rated its ice wine harvested last winter at 86. Both scores are out of 100.

The four wineries that serve ice wine on the Niagara Wine Trail are among 11 on the trail. At least two more wineries will open along the trail this year. Niagara Landing is the oldest. It will celebrate its 10th anniversary on the weekend of its “Ice Wine Heroes” party.

The weather on the Niagara Frontier has proven the best in the world when it comes to ice wine production. German vintners first started to make it about 200 years ago from the frozen spoils in their vineyards but Niagara-on-the-Lake has been the epicenter of ice wine since 1991, when the owners of Inniskillin won the prestigious Grand Prix d’Honneur with its 1989 Icewine at an international wine competition in Bordeaux , France .

In Canada, they spell it "Icewine," taken from the German, "EisWein."

"Ten years ago, you just looked across the border at Niagara-on-the-Lake and it's thriving and there's no difference there," except more government incentives, Connelly said. "On this side, it was time. ... We knew we could do it and we have the same climate."

Peter Gamble is a winery consultant in Niagara-on-the-Lake currently working on projects in Michigan, Nova Scotia, British Columbia and Argentina. "There's good reason to believe that Niagara County would have an excellent shot of producing quality ice wine," he said.

Ice wine has barely made a blip on the New York State wine map, and is grown by fewer than a dozen wineries, all of them in Western New York or the Finger Lakes, where the climate is best. During an average year, 200 million bottles of wine are produced across the state, said Jim Trezise, president the New York Wine & Grape Foundation in Canandaigua. "Ice wine is really a drop in the bottle," and accounts for 50,000 bottles, "maybe," he said.

About half the 85 wineries that make up the Wine Council of Ontario sell wine. Although it also accounts for a small percentage of overall volume, it makes up 40 percent of all wine exports from the province, said Duncan Gibson, the council’s finance director. Asia and the U.S. are the strongest export markets.

It also has the power to draw visitors, particularly off-season, as evidenced by the continuing success of the Niagara Icewine Festival. Its latest installment is this month in southern Ontario.

“If I get phone call from out of state or tourist coming to visit the falls,” Connelly said, “the most likely question I'm going to get after, ‘How do I get to you?’ is, ‘Do you have an ice wine?’ It's a big draw. It's not our biggest seller, but it's part of our business plan.”

It might cost more, but considering what goes into making it, many wine-lovers think it’s well worth it.

“Ice wine is our celebration wine,” said Connelly, whose family has grown grapes in Niagara County for three generations. “For us, we’re celebrating this region, this wine and this family.”