Ice Wine Anyone?

Nope, I said it right. Ice coffee we may have heard of but, ice wine? Ice wine is a wine that is produced under certain types of weather conditions and is a very rare form of wine. This type of wine is produced where the conditions right for the wine. Where is that place? How about the Pacific Northwest?

Believe it or not ice wine is not made is large quantities. With the lack of availability in fine wines and the need for only fine wines, this makes large amounts difficult to make. The end result is a wine so very rare that only a lucky few are actually able to purchase the wine. As you can imagine with something so scarce, it is extremely expensive to get your hands on. Well for the majority of us anyway who are not in the habit of having hundreds of thousands just lying around.

Ice wine is something so rare that many of us want it. We all seem to want what we can’t have right? It isn’t just that there is a need the rarest of materials. Oh no, we couldn’t stop there. The weather conditions are of the utmost concern and are crucial when making such a rare wine. Once that golden time arrives, wine makers show their stuff and get to work preparing this one of a kind priceless wine.

How does someone make such a priceless wine? You just need to have the basics like any other fine wine maker. All you need is fully ripened grapes and a temperature of around 5 degrees C. That shouldn’t be a problem right? The wine making process itself takes several days and the temperature needs to remain this low to ensure quality grapes. See, the grapes held in these conditions are frozen naturally and are then hand plucked by the wine makers and their assistants.

It takes full vine of grapes to make a bottle of ice wine. The grapes themselves need to be gently pressed making sure only the running juice is collected. With such low temperatures, what you are collecting is actually frozen water crystals. These crystals are fermented with sugars and particles that the free running juices produce. This is how the wonderful but very rare ice wine is created.

Good luck trying to sample this fine wine. You’re not going to be able to find this rare bread of alcohol at your local wine store. You won’t have much luck on the internet either unless you just happened to catch it at the right time. Once you go through the trouble of finding it, how will you possibly pay for it? A single bottle easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A better alternative to going broke is to find the right wine maker within the Pacific Northwest region. The bottles go extremely fast once made but, you may be able to snag some the wine maker has on hand. You’re still going to spend quite a bit for your sample, but a little taste is all you need to savor this one of a kind ice wine.