What Is Ice Wine?
One type of wine that is commonly overlooked is the dessert wine. Often considered too sweet to drink, its potential is generally never recognized. One dessert wine, however, that has a natural curb to its sweetness is ice wine. Ice wine has been the noble staple of countries such as Austria, Germany and Canada for years. Does this Spark an idea?
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What is it?
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Ice wine is wine that has been made from ripe frozen grapes.
Why is it sometimes called eiswein?
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Eiswein is the German term for ice wine. It is held in very high regard because of Germany and Austria's reputation for making superb ice wines, so the term is kept to refer to those wines from these specific regions.
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Dangers/Precautions
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Since the grapes that are used are frozen, they are extremely fragile. This requires that each grape be individually hand-picked. To avoid the heat from one's hand warming the grape, and thereby damaging it, pickers must wear very thick gloves to preserve the grape's temperature. These gloves make it more difficult to pick the rather small grapes, so another large danger during harvesting is dropping these grapes in the snow, where they are either lost or too damaged to use.
Flavor
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The frozen nature of the grape allows it to retain a good portion of its moisture and sugar. This means that when the grape is crushed and processed, it yields a wine that is on the sweet side. What makes ice wine stand out from other wines of its classification is its typically higher level of acidity, which helps curb its sweetness. Ice wine is typically seen as a dessert wine, aperitif or simply a stand-alone wine.
Where is it grown?
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Ice wine requires climates favorable to freezing grapes, so it is primarily grown in regions supportive of these low temperatures. The most predominant countries to grow grapes for ice wine are Germany, Austria, Canada and portions of the United States.
Food pairing
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Ice wine is typically sweet with an edge of acidity, so it should mainly be paired with fruit and desserts containing modest amounts of sugar. One dessert food that is noted to avoid with ice wine, however, is chocolate.
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