Canada: Quebec’s ice wine industry prepares for battle

(Yahoo) - Charles-Henri de Coussergues is one of an estimated 120 Canadian vintners taking part in the laboured yearly exercise of making ice wine. After the first frost, his three hectares of vidal grapes shrink on the vine. Inside each orb, the liquid becomes thicker and sweeter with each successive frost. De Coussergues needs several freeze-thaw cycles for his grapes to reach the necessary 35 per cent sugar content. The frozen grapes are then put into a press and the resulting syrup is fermented and, eventually, bottled and sold—$29 for 200 ml.

Ice wine is a lucrative business, but the process of making it isn’t without its frustrations. Once frozen, the vidal variety grapes yield as little as one-sixth as much ice wine as they would table wine. The weather is rarely predictable and often treacherous, and the window to harvest the grapes is tiny. Yet de Coussergues’s biggest headache these days is not nature, but the distinct possibility that the federal government might not recognize his bounty as ice wine at all.

Like the vast majority of Quebec’s 21 ice wine producers, de Coussergues uses the so-called “hammock” method, one that he developed at his winery, Orpailleur, the province’s largest. Every year, he strings hammock-like nets over the top of the vines. After the first frost wilts the leaves, his team clips the grapes and places them in this netting, harvesting them once the grapes are sufficiently sweet.