Credit to Mr. Sloth himself, Paul Kiernan, for giving me the heads up on this story at a recent wine tasting. As Decanter reported, Spanish icewines can now be produced under the DO of Penedès, but significantly it is the first European appellation to allow the artificial freezing of grapes. “Cryoextraction” or mechanical freezing, simulates the effects of frost. These wines are often called ‘icebox’ wines. I’m not taking anything away from Penedès of course – I have yet to try any from this region so I reserve my judgement.

A tweet or two on Twitter Friday past galvanized a few thoughts on Canadian icewine, and specifically if it would have much of a demand in the Irish market…

@climatech – if bud can do so well here (cold and alchohlic), I’d say yes…I’d be a willing guinea pig!

@sashaw – a Canadian Ice Wine barely sells in Canada. But, we do have the currency exchange in our favour here.

@lisamareedom – no; Irish like tablewine on the sweet side. Wouldn’t get it.

My first taste of ice wine was in Canada. Later, in New Zealand, I tried the awarding winning Siedfried Riesling icewine. It was astonishing and my most memorable to date.

So what is icewine?

Also known as Eiswein in Germany, icewine is a type of dessert wine. Lusciously sweet, savagely drinkable and very bad for your teeth, icewines are made using grapes that have frozen while still on the vine. Importantly, the grapes are allowed to sit on the vine for a prolonged period.

As we know, a banana or a pear that has been maturing in the fruit bowl will taste much sweeter than one that is not ready to eat. As the grapes age, the sugar content rises, and this is all a few weeks after the harvest takes place for normal wines.

In the case of icewine, the matured grapes are picked while they are frozen on the vine. This is where the risk lies. If a freeze doesn’t come quickly enough, the grapes might rot and the crop is lost. If the freeze is too severe, there is no juice to be extracted.

Parts of Germany and Canada receive the perfect climatic conditions, allowing enough time for the grapes to develop high levels of sugar before it gets too cold. The best icewines capture the point when the sugar and acid levels balance almost perfectly, and if made well enough, will show in the final wine.

One of the hardest desserts that you will ever have to make is a soufflé but we have cracked it and made a super simple recipe here. If you are panicking about making a soufflé and that you will see it collapse, don’t worry because you are not alone, as every chef in the world holds their breath as a soufflé comes out of the oven, even if they have made them 100 times before.

I am guessing that the Curious boys will be able to match this up with dessert wine perfectly as it is light and pretty neutral in flavour which should work with a sweet dessert wine. Over to you boys……

Mike’s wine match:

Classic dessert and spot on Niall in terms of made for a lovely dessert wine.

I still think dessert wines are one of the world’s best kept secrets. Yes, you generally pay a bit more in terms of cost per litre – many half bottles are considerably more expensive than a regular bottle of decent table wine – but the experience can be close to heavenly, and there’s no better way to cap off a fine meal.

There’s still a consideration to be made in terms of the dessert and the sweet wine to match it, mainly around the sweetness and flavours. Basically a super sweet dessert needs a super sweet dessert wine.

The sweetness and strength of flavours in Niall’s soufflé don’t demand a supercharged wine, rather something more subtle, so I’m immediately drawn to our Keith Tulloch Botrytis Semillon. Semillon’s not renowned for it’s expression but the effect of the noble rot on these Hunter Valley grapes produces the most incredible butterscotch and honey flavours, along with ripe apricot and orange peel. I’ve recommended it before with dessert pancakes and I think it’d just be superb with this.

Ireland is finally starting to catch on to dessert wines. It was Canadian ice wine that ultimately did it for me, and since, I’ve managed to convert plenty of people, but it must be remembered that these aren’t glugging wines. Often an ideal accompaniment to dessert, or simply on their own, they are to be enjoyed in smaller doses, as you would perhaps a Port or a Sherry.

Yeast converts sugar into alcohol. With standard dry wine, fermentation continues until you can no longer detect the sugar. For good sweet wines, the fermentation is interrupted before all the sugar can be converted into alcohol. Although some may have sweet liquids added, such as unfermented grape juice.

You may notice that an over-ripe banana is much sweeter than a young banana that still has a green ting to the skin. It’s the same with grapes in a vineyard. The winemaker simply leaves the grapes on the vines until they achieve the appropriate sugar levels. The alcohol content will be similar to normal wine, so even though the fermentation is interrupted, there was more sugar to start with, so an alcohol content of, say 13%, can still be reached with residual sugar remaining.

There are three methods used to concentrate the sugar levels, which gives that lovely richness to dessert wine:

Dried Grape Wines: Drying causes the grapes to shrivel, water content to evaporate and concentration to improve. Recioto wines of Italy are good examples.

Noble Rot Wines: When the Botrytis (pronounced Baw-try-tiss) cinerea mould attacks healthy, ripe grapes, it weakens the skin, speeding up the evaporation, causing them to shrivel (as in the above picture), and concentrating sugars and acids, with the mould adding its own unique flavours. Certain conditions are needed for this to happen. The grapes must have a problem-free ripening period to start with. Damp, misty mornings encourage the growth and spread of the Botrytis mould, and warm dry afternoons speed up drying. Certain grape varieties are susceptible to noble rot, including Riesling, Semillon and Chenin Blanc (although we have a Botrytis wine from the Sauvignon Blanc grape).

Frozen Grape Wines: Ice wines are harvested in the winter when the water in the grapes is frozen. They are crushed with the ice crystals being removed, leaving an intensely concentrated sugary grape syrup. The concentrated juice from these healthy grapes results in wines with very pure, pronounced, varietal-fruity flavours, high acidity, full body and syrupy sweetness. The best ice wine I’ve ever tasted was the Decanter Trophy winning Seifried of New Zealand. Unfortunately, due to silly legislation, Irish and UK wine merchants can’t stock New Zealand dessert wine.

Dessert wines tend to be more expensive than most standard wine when considered drop for drop. Labour is more intensive as careful, handpicked selections are required, and more grapes are needed to make the same amount of wine. Most will come in 375 ml bottles, as opposed to the usual 750 ml. But as mentioned, these aren’t glugging wines. They are to be enjoyed is small quantities. A good dessert wine will have the acidity to balance the sugars, so if you come across one that is sickly sweet, you’ve probably got a bad one.

We have managed to source some of the best dessert wines available in Ireland from three different grape varieties. One is also included in our Curious Easter Mix. Naturally, there is no added sugar.

For me, dessert wines remain the wine world’s best kept secret. For many people however, I suspect sweet wine brings back bad memories of Concorde and Blue Nun. (For those born after 1980, no I’m not referring to supersonic aircraft or Mother Theresa telling dirty jokes, but the cheap and sickly sweet wines that attracted, then quickly repelled, so many novice wine drinkers in the 80s).

The reality today is that some of the world’s finest, and correspondingly expensive, wines are the highly specialised, super-concentrated and exquisitely-balanced dessert wines of Sauternes, Tokaji, or even the depths of the Canadian winter.

Fine dessert wines are typically made by one of the following methods:

• Botrytis or ‘noble rot’: a rare condition requiring a series of specific conditions in which the fungus botrytis cinerea attacks healthy and fully ripe grapes. The resulting rot causes the grapes to shrivel and produce the most incredible concentration of sugars and acids. Botrytised wines such as Villard’s El Noble Sauvignon Blanc and Keith Tulloch’s Semillon show that critical balance of sweetness and acidity referred to in last week’s post on the tasting senses.
• Late picking: often labelled ‘Late Harvest’ as in Tabali’s Muscat, and in the right climate rivalling botrytised wines for sheer concentration of flavour, grapes are left on the vine for as long as possible to concentrate the grape juice naturally.
• Drying the grapes: in the same principle as late harvesting for concentration of juices, Italy’s sweet red Recioto wines are produced by picking the ripe grapes and drying until shrivelled before pressing.
• Freezing the grapes: Canada, Germany, Austria, and most recently New Zealand all produce the incredible delicacy of ice wine (or Eiswein), with New Zealand’s Siefried and Canada’s Inniskillen proving stunning examples in recent personal tastings.

Good dessert wines don’t tend to come cheap, and that’s mostly down to the labour-intensive processes outlined above, and the often tiny yields that get produced. Inniskillen as an example claim that each frozen grape contributes just one drop of grape nectar to the finished wine.

But trust me as I let slip our best kept secret, these dessert wines have to be experienced. And if you’re struggling to justify a little luxury in the current doom-and-gloom, let me pass on the advice of a more experienced work colleague on the birth of my first child: “From now on Mike”, he said, “always fly First Class. Because if you don’t your son-in-law will.”

Dessert anyone?