Ingredients · Flavouring
Ice Wine
Vitis vinifera · Vitaceae (grape family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
In a blend it brings honeyed sweetness and a touch of acid. The tea it sits in is built as an occasion rather than an everyday cup — a celebration tea, which is how the shop's note describes it.
With food
Blue cheese and foie gras, which is how the wine itself is served. Apricot and peach. Almond. Dark chocolate. Shortbread.
With spices
Vanilla. Cinnamon. Cardamom. Star anise.
With tea
Black tea and white tea together, which is what the shop's blend uses.
Its story
Where it comes from
Our product lists Ontario ice wine; the Niagara Peninsula is where almost all Canadian ice wine is made. The supplier record for the wine itself is unconfirmed.
What happened
The idea is old and accidental. There are indications of wine from frozen grapes in Roman times, and the first post-Roman ice wine is believed to have been made in Franconia in 1794 — but the better-documented one is at Dromersheim near Bingen on 11 February 1830, when growers who had left grapes hanging as animal fodder through the harsh winter of 1829 found the frozen fruit gave a very sweet must and pressed it. Canada's first was made by a German immigrant, Walter Hainle, in the Okanagan Valley in 1972 — forty litres, from an early and unexpected frost — and he first sold it in 1978. Inniskillin's first attempt at Niagara in 1983 was eaten by birds; with netting, the 1984 harvest of naturally frozen Vidal became the first Canadian icewine made commercially, and its 1989 vintage won the Grand Prix d'Honneur at Vinexpo in Bordeaux in 1991. The harvest is picked at −8°C or colder and pressed while still frozen, which is why pickers usually work at night.
