Under the Night Sky

Once picked, icewine-makers press the grapes and measure the juice’s sugar levels. The aim is to get between 35 and 39 degrees Brix — the term for sugar content in a liquid. High sugars can make fermentation difficult, which is why icewine tends to be lower in alcohol than your average table wine.

For Slingerland, whose family began farming grapes and fruit in Niagara-on-the-Lake back in 1783, the wine industry runs deep in his roots. He learned traditional winemaking methods from his father-in-law, Gary Pillitteri, in the early 1980s. He has since won many accolades for his work, including from the time he spent on the Verona Appassimento Project — a project dedicated to developing appassimento-style wines in Ontario, a form of winemaking where harvested grapes are dried out to concentrate sugars and flavours.

This year will mark the 30th the Niagara-on-the-Lake veteran has harvested grapes for icewine. During those three decades, not one harvest has been the same.

This time around, Slingerland and his team were able to make a first pick before Christmas — something that happens only 30 per cent of the time.

Prolonged stretches of cold temperatures usually don’t come until later in the season, or in January. He vividly recalls clinking glasses at midnight on many New Year’s Eve nights, then quickly jumping into standby mode for harvest. Most of the picking, he estimates 90 per cent of the time, is done within the first two weeks of January.

Sue-Ann Staff, the owner and winemaker at Sue-Ann Staff Estate Winery in Jordan, also recalls a New Year’s Eve harvest — her very first in 2007.

“We had two really good days of harvesting on New Year’s Eve and the day before,” she says. She was able to get about 40 per cent of the crop off in those two nights. But waiting for the next cold stretch was a testament to the winemaker’s patience — and risk threshold. The next adequate days to pick came on February 14 and March 23 — the latest “anybody has ever picked.”

The grapes were “quite dehydrated” by that point, she explains, and she was only able to press about 70 per cent of the juice she normally could. If those cold stretches hadn’t come, Staff says the grapes would have been a write-off or picked for lesser-style dessert wines, such as a late harvest.

Staff, who’s been nicknamed the “Ice Queen” for her work with icewine when she was Pillitteri’s winemaker and now at her own winery, admits icewine making is a “huge gamble.”

“You don’t know when the right day is going to come, you may have to drop everything in life even over the holidays,” she says. This year, due to business travels in Asia, she wasn’t able to get the grapes off in time before Christmas, something she says she may regret.

 For Paul Speck, president and co-owner of Henry of Pelham Estate Winery in St. Catharines, the icewine gamble depends on the size of the market.

“The wine business is risky all the time,” he explains. “This is agriculture, if you can’t handle a risk in Mother Nature then you shouldn’t be in the wine business.”

For Henry of Pelham, which celebrates 30 years of winemaking in 2018, the first icewine vintage came in 1989. Speck recently uncorked one of those almost three-decades-old bottles. He described it as full of classic fruit flavours such as apricot, only riper and with plenty of retained acidity.

Drinking the wine reminds him that “many, many years ago I stopped worrying about the weather because certain things I can’t change in my life. So, you just have to give up worrying about it and hope everything works out.”

The shift to mechanical harvesting is one change that has removed some of the risk. Though some smaller wineries will still pick by hand, most operations — including those of Slingerland, Staff and Speck — use large, single-person mechanical harvesters to remove grapes from the frozen vines.

Slingerland recalls a time when there would be 90 people in the field, working around the clock, removing grapes and placing them in boxes on the ground. The ground, being warmer than the air, added another element of precariousness to the harvest — the boxes needed to be removed quickly to prevent thawing.

Today, Slingerland operates the harvester himself and works with a small crew of four. Though not as romantic as the image of hand-picking bunches of grapes under a full moon with snow blanketing the surroundings, it is a far more effective way of ensuring quality and speed.

The large machine shakes the grapes off the vines, which “sound like stones hitting the walls of the harvester” Slingerland describes.

He sits perched six feet above the grape rows, able to see the lights from a dozen other harvesters in the distance doing the same thing.

“It’s kind of an unspoken bond between brothers at work in the early and long hours of the night that few people will ever experience,” he says

The effort and the risk involved almost doesn’t seem worth it when you look at the numbers. For its 2017 harvest, Pillitteri estimates harvesting 1,500 metric tonnes of frozen grapes, which will make one-million small (200 or 375 millimetre) bottles. To put this in perspective, yields for icewine are only 15 per cent of the expected yield for table wines.

But all that work does pay off, just not necessarily at home in Ontario.

“Canada is more famous for its ice wine in wine circles than it is for hockey in hockey circles,” argues Slingerland, adding that icewine can either make or break their business.

Pillitteri sells icewine in 40 countries and exports up to 60 per cent of its icewine, much of it to Asia — making it one of the global leaders in icewine trade.

Staff, who recently returned from a trip to China and Vietnam, says Asia is the biggest market for icewine in the world. “It’s highly prized and a very prestigious gift to give,” she explains.

For Speck, icewine has become synonymous with Canadian culture around the world and “what it means to represent Canada... maple syrup, hockey, moose and icewine... they go together.”

So great is the international love affair with Canadian icewine, that fraudulent bottles have now entered the market. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Staff recalls travelling to Asia and being surprised at the low price point on some bottles of Canadian ice wine, only to find they were fakes upon closer inspection.