The following message was posted to: CANWINE
Hi all
At 3 a.m. yesterday, we took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to harvest part of our Icewine crop, as temperatures dipped below the required -8C (17.6 F).
A dozen warmly bundled pickers faced the cold winds and harvested over a ton of Riesling grapes from the estate vineyard next to the winery. With the aid of car and tractor headlights shining down the rows of vines, we plucked the rock-solid berries into buckets. At 7 a.m., as the sun began to rise, the temperature rose to -8C again, and the harvest was interrupted.
Slow pressing yielded about 400 litres of highly concentrated juice, measuring 37.2% sugar. This is well above the required threshold for Canadian Icewine, 35% sugar.
I'm very happy with the both the quantity and quality of the harvest. The Riesling grapes were beautifully mature going into this picking. That means a good amount of juice, and more importantly, rich, ripe flavours for the resulting wine.
This was the earliest Icewine harvest in the Okanagan Valley in a number of years, and marks a welcome change to recent Icewine history for us. The last six winters have been unusually mild, and have prevented us from making our trademark Icewine in three of those years. Previous to that, we had an unbroken record of consecutive vintages of Icewine, going back to its inaugural in 1978.
Cheers Tilman
Forwarded for interest.