Cold brings on Ice Wine

Area wineries are scrambling to make ice wine
while winter conditions are right.
Crews at Johnson Estate Winery in Chautauqua County have been harvesting grapes and pressing ice wine for the past week.

Winemaker
Jeff Murphy says it must be below 18 degrees to make the sweet wine, which is a highly concentrated.
"It's like taking four bottles of wine and concentrating it down into one small half bottle of wine," he said. "It's not any more potent alcohol-wise, but it's a lot more potent flavor and sugar-content wise."
He says making ice wine is always a gamble, but this season was especially tricky, due to warm weather in early winter. "It probably dropped yields by 20 to 30 percent," he said. "From additional rot and bird damage."
Murphy also says grapes also began to "raisin" on the vine. The winery typically produces 150 to 200 cases of ice wine every year, but Mother Nature didn't cooperate with this season's expansion plans. "We planned on making a lot more this year," Murphy said. "But with the warm weather it's probably going to be just slightly more than last year."
Johnson Estate has been making the ice wine, in both red and white, for more than a decade and has won awards for its product, which is sold in area stores and at the winery.

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