Ice wine

Uncommon card · No. 129742

Ice wine (or icewine; German: Eiswein) is a type of dessert wine produced from grapes that have been frozen while still on the vine. The sugars and other dissolved solids do not freeze, but the water does, allowing for a more concentrated grape juice to develop. The grapes' must is then pressed from the frozen grapes, resulting in a smaller amount of more concentrated, very sweet juice. With ice wines, the freezing happens before the fermentation, not afterwards. Unlike other dessert wines such as Sauternes, Tokaji, or Trockenbeerenauslese, which are made from grapes affected by Botrytis cinerea or noble rot, it is undesirable for grapes harvested for ice wine to be affected by noble rot. Only healthy grapes keep in good shape until the opportunity arises for an ice wine harvest, which in extreme cases can occur after the New Year, on a northern hemisphere calendar. This gives ice wine its characteristic refreshing sweetness balanced by high acidity. When the grapes are free of Botrytis...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Mya, CC BY 2.0