Time to harvest the ice wine

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Most of us may not like it, but the plummeting temperatures are creating perfect harvest conditions for this year’s ice wine crop. Grape growers and wineries were scrambling today to get the ice wine crop picked before the it starts warming up again.

Jamie Slingerland of Pillitteri Estates Winery has been harvesting frozen grapes in his Niagara-on-the-Lake vineyards for 16 hours straight: “This is the week to do ice wine and think everybody’s going to get their ice wine wrapped up this week.”

You need a minimum of minus eight degrees Celsius to harvest and the next few days
will be perfect. With 100 acres of frozen grapes, Pillitteri’s is the largest producer of ice wine in the world.

Slingerland: “The Vidal for example that we’re picking today, it turns to this beautiful brown colour and that creates this new intense flavour, and so we need the freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing until they turn brown.”

There is about 36 hundred tonnes of ice wine grapes in Niagara region to be picked. Canada alone produces 90 per cent of the world’s ice wine. At Pillitteri’s the picking and pressing goes on all day.

They’re squeezing all the liquid out of these grapes that they can — the juice, they call liquid gold.

The frozen grapes being pressed here at Pillitteri’s and across the peninsula will produce about 750 thousand litres of ice wine juice.

All the grapes Jamie Slingerland is harvesting today will be turned into 50 thousand cases of ice wine that will be on retail shelves in about a year.