With temperatures falling to -8 C and colder over the next several days, Niagara growers and wineries are planning to pick their first grapes for Canada’s famous icewine.
The chilly weather just happens to coincide with the first weekend of the Niagara Icewine Festival, which kicked off this weekend in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and at the swanky “Cool as Ice Gala,” which took place at the Niagara Parks Power Station and celebrated all things icewine and food.
The festival will run for three weekends in January with tastings at partner wineries and street tastings in historic Niagara-on-the-Lake Old Town.
Pillitteri Estates Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of Canada’s leading producers of Icewine, is expecting Mother Nature to deliver a frigid bout of winter weather, the winery said in news release. The winery’s icewine harvest began Sunday evening (see photo above) with harvests also planned for Monday and Tuesday evenings. Other wineries, such as Peninsula Ridge in Beamsville, Ravine, Stratus and Two Sisters in Niagara-on-the-Lake and growers such as Bob Nedelko and Huebel Grapes Estates are also planning to begin harvesting frozen grapes in the next few days.
With temperatures expected to drop to -12 C, Pillitteri’s director of viniculture, Jamie Slingerland, who oversees the picking of icewine, is expecting a challenging but high-quality harvest. “At these temperatures, machinery does not always co-operate, hoses become brittle, belts snap, it rarely ever runs smoothly, there are always challenges but we manage to make it work year after year,” he said. “This will be my 35th consecutive year harvesting icewine. It is amazing that no two years are ever the same. The good news is that the colder it gets, the higher the sugar concentrations and the better the quality. A -10 C harvest is ideal.”
The legal threshold for an icewine harvest in Canada is set at -8 C and there is concern that global climate change has threatened Canadian icewine harvests but with this cold spell arriving, it truly is reason for all of Niagara’s wineries to celebrate good times,” said the news release.
Canada is the world’s leading producer of icewine in terms of quality and quantity. Pillitteri Estates Winery is the world’s largest “estate” producer of icewine and is the official wine partner of the Canadian Olympic Team, producing the official icewine of Team Canada. Founded in 1993 and situated on 130 acres of vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the family-owned winery has three generations and eight family members employed full-time in the operation. It currently exports icewine to 38 countries.
— Report by Wines in Niagara with information provided by Pillitteri
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