While watching all that snow piling up, I was reminded of a year when something like this happened and resulted in a wine made from frozen grapes — an ice wine. Perfect timing is needed to produce this rare and exquisite wine, beer or cider.
Centuries ago, before refrigeration, the first frozen liquid beverage may well have been eisbock. It was not so much invented as one of those mistakes that resulted in happily ever after in your stein.
It happened sometime in the 18th century in a brewery in Kulmbach, Germany. Workers accidentally left a few kegs of bock bier out on a cold winter’s night. In the morning, some brave soul (but not as brave as the guy who tasted the first oyster) decided to taste it before feeding it to the livestock. The unfrozen portion of the beer was pretty potent, profoundly delicious and decidedly sweet in its maltiness. Eisbock was born.
Eisbock is a really strong dark beer strong in both malt and alcohol. Today making an Eisbock is basically the same but using modern equipment such as freezers to freeze the water and separate a portion of it, thus concentrating the alcohol and malt sugars.
Because water has a higher freezing point than alcohol, when the water freezes, it leaves the alcohol liquid. When the ice is removed, the remaining beer is stronger in flavor and alcohol.
One of my favorites is the elegant Aventinus Eisbock, which is dark-colored with aromas of baking spices, plums and almonds. They use open fermentation and a frost-maturing process to produce this concentrated beer with 12 percent alcohol. For you home-brewing types, the original gravity was 25.5 percent.
As you may suspect, making a tasty beverage even more rich and concentrated can be done by freezing the juice, wort or fruit. But back then, a hard freeze could only happen in a northern hemisphere country. Definitely Germany, Austria and northern Italy. In the new world, Ontario and the Okanagan in Canada excel with Washington, New York and Idaho producing when Mother Nature cooperates.
In Germany, Eiswein is an elixir that happens in this most northerly wine-producing country with some frequency. When this wine region suffered a particularly harsh winter, somebody tasted the frozen grapes and decided it was too good for the livestock. Records in the late 1700s and early 1800s talk about leaving grapes on the vine and discovering how sweet they were when frozen.
Still, it was rare for conditions to be just right to make an Eiswein until 1961 when weather conditions were ripe and a number of Eisweins were produced. That was the watershed vintage and being Germany, production became more systematic and rules were applied. Conditions had to be 19 degrees Fahrenheit or colder — no chaptalizing (adding sugar) or cryogenics.
Production was also assisted by technology. Portable generators lit up the vineyards in the early-morning hours so pickers could harvest the grapes before the sun rose and thawed the grapes. When the grapes did thaw, rot would set in.
Pressing was done with a bladder press, which is a gentler way of pressing grapes than the screw press. This allowed the concentrated juice to flow, leaving the ice crystals behind. The higher sugar levels in the frozen grapes also make the fermentation process slower than usual.
During the time spent waiting for the ripe grapes to freeze, your winemaker's fingers are crossed, hoping you don’t lose the harvest to hungry wildlife. The solution to that problem was nets covering the vineyards to keep hungry birds from flying away with the harvest.
From 1961 through the 1990s, production ramped up. But in the early 2000s, Eiswein vintages became more infrequent. Many think climate change may have something to do with it.
An early and unexpected frost produced Canada’s first known icewine in the Okanagan Valley. It was made by a German immigrant, Walter Hainle in 1972. On the other side of the country, Inniskillin Winery produced its first icewine in 1984 under the direction of Austrian-born Karl Kaiser. Inniskillin's first ice wine was made from Vidal grapes, a white hybrid grape that is very winter-hardy and produces high sugar levels in cold climates and balancing acidity.
After Inniskillin won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at Vinexpo (held in Bordeaux for over a thousand wine professionals around the world) for its 1989 Vidal Icewine, Canada was well on its way to become the largest producer of Icewine in the world. Other traditional Vinifera grapes being used today are Riesling, Gewurztraminer and even Cab Franc.
This past fall, with three apple trees laden with fruit, my friend, Josh, talked me into making cider. With advice from my wine and beer guru from Vermont, I learned that freezing the apples before putting them in the turn press broke down the molecules in the fruit and produced the sweetest, purest and very cold juice.
Ice cider was originally created in Quebec in 1989, made possible by the frigid cold temperatures and inspired by German Eisweins. Friends from Vermont introduced me to the Quebecois Ice Ciders made in a similar fashion as their Icewines. And like their Icewines, they're concentrated goodness of fruit sugars, however, ice cider requires almost five times as many apples as regular cider.
Today, there are over 75 producers of ice ciders. A few producers to try would be Neige, Union Libre and Domaine des Salamandres. Serve these Eisweins and Ice Ciders with apple cake, pour concentrated sweetness into small dessert wine glasses for an out-of-this-world pairing. It’ll make you swoon.