What Is Ice Wine? Grapes Picked Frozen on the Vine

Picture a vineyard in the middle of winter. The leaves are long gone, snow lies between the rows, and a few bunches of grapes still hang on the vines, frozen hard as marbles. A crew walks out in the dark to pick them before sunrise. That is ice wine, and the Finger Lakes are one of the places cold enough to make it.

We don't make ice wine ourselves, and we'd rather say so up front. Guests still ask about it often, since they see it on shelves around the lakes, so this is how we explain it across the tasting bar. At the end there's a word about the other road to a sweet wine, the one we do take.

Naturally is the word that matters. The grapes hang well past the normal harvest, into late fall and winter, until a hard freeze turns them solid. Grapes picked at the usual time and put in a freezer make something else, and in the regions with ice wine rules that wine can't carry the name.

The style comes from Germany and Austria, where it is called Eiswein, and it became closely associated with Canada. It needs a place with a real winter, warm enough in summer to ripen grapes and cold enough afterward to freeze them on the vine.

A carton of juice in the freezer shows the same thing. Wait until it's half frozen, and the first liquid you pour off is the strongest, because the water froze and stayed behind. Ice wine works the same way, only inside each grape, on the vine, in the snow.

All that concentration has a cost. A frozen grape gives only a few drops, birds and weather take their share of the fruit over the long wait, and the press has to work hard against the ice. It's one reason ice wine is sold in small bottles.

1. Leave healthy grapes on the vine after the normal harvest, often under netting against birds.
2. Wait for a hard, sustained freeze. Some years it comes early, some years late.
3. Pick by hand at night or first light, while the grapes are frozen solid.
4. Press immediately, in the cold, so the ice stays in the press.
5. Ferment the small amount of concentrated juice, slowly, because the sugar level is so high.

Nobody knows the picking date in advance, and when it comes, the work is cold and needs every available hand. For a winemaker, that uncertainty is both the appeal and the headache.

The lakes are the reason grapes ripen here at all. In fall, the deep water gives back the summer's warmth and keeps frost off the slopes, so the fruit can hang late, and then winter arrives in earnest. According to the Finger Lakes Wine Alliance, Vidal Blanc is widely known for ice wine in Canada and is also found in the Finger Lakes, where some of the region's longstanding producers have championed it for ice wine. The Alliance's page on Riesling mentions ice wine and late harvest styles too, with cool-climate acidity balancing their sugar.

Acidity is what holds a good sweet wine together. Sugar alone would make it heavy and flat. Cold-climate grapes keep a high natural acidity, and the tension between the two gives ice wine its shape. Our piece on dry vs sweet wine goes further into that balance between sugar and acid.

This is where we come in. Our Vendanges Tardives is a late harvest wine, and the French name means exactly that, "late harvests". We leave the fruit hanging past the main picking on our slope above Keuka Lake, where the lake keeps the vines cool and lets the season stretch. We pick it in the fall, before the grapes freeze, and age the wine in barrel. That is our road to a sweet wine.

To see where the Vendanges Tardives sits among our other wines, including the dry and off-dry Rieslings made alongside it, look at our wines page, and is Riesling sweet or dry? explains how a winemaker makes that call. You can also ask us directly during an Educational Wine Tasting, listed with our other experiences.