Via Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP
Team Vinicola Perico, Vinicola Vineyards in Santa Catarina, Brazil
Our friends at the METSUL reports that for the first time ever in Brazil icewine has been produced in this unusually cold June in Southern Brazil. This is a release on the Vinicolo Vineyard website. The following is a rough web based translation from Portuguese to English. The original Portuguese story is here.
With pleasure we inform that the Perico team yesterday registered in its vineyards, located in the farm Boy God, District of the Perico in Joaquin – Santa Catarina, a phenomenon of the nature, the most waited of this time: the ice wine. The temperatures had fallen well below-freezing and the thermometers had marked – 7.5 C. A dream if became reality: the harvest of the grapes congealed for this so wonderful act of the nature.
With this, the Vinicola Perico, will be first ever vineyard in Brazil to produce ICEWINE (Wine of the Ice), a natural licoroso wine, with raised amount of residual sugar of the proper grape.
The process of production of the Icewine, consists of mature grapes and extreme cold at-6 C, in this condition, the water that if find in the interior of the berries of the grapes congeal and the ice separates the rich juice in sugar. When the grapes are just right, they’re carefully picked by hand. Grapes in this condition have a very low yield – often an entire vine only makes a single bottle. That’s why ice wine can be so expensive and is often sold in half-bottles only … but it’s worth it! After this long harvest process, the grapes go through weeks of fermentation, followed by a few months of barrel aging in new barrels of French oak, Allier forest. The wine ends up a golden color, or a deep, rich amber. It has a very sweet (of course) taste. After vinificado we will have the pleasure to present this great BRAZILIAN only ICEWINE, which happens in Austria, Germany, north of Italy and Canada. See photos of our vineyard to the dawn, before and after the sun rose. More photos on home page.. More photos on home page.
We have posted stories on how this cold spring has caused agricultural problems in many locations worldwide. See this post . See David Archibald’s post originally on Icecap in which he forecasted these agricultural issues reposted with comments on Watts Up With That here. See Bloomberg post on spring wheat concerns in Canada due to a very cold May. See more on Spring in Canada here
Despite all these anecdotal evidences of global cooling, NOAA announced May 2009 was the 4th warmest in 130 years of record keeping (and manipulation) with an anomaly of +0.53C just a week after the University of Alabama using the NASA MSU satellite data assessed the global anomaly at just +0.043C, making it the 15th coldest in 31 years. Anthony and I will surely have more to say on this unlikely divergence soon.
Alexandre Aguiar
On the other hand please keep the nature of icewine in mind. Icewine is not a simple product to create. Apart from a market demand you’d need quite a bit of planning, as I will point out in the following paragraph. I consider this to be a more likely scenario than an emergency solution due to bad weather.
The first icewine was the result of a very bad winter which virtually destroyed the harvest. Only when cutting the grapes as cattle feed did the vintner find out about the high sugar content of the remaining grapes and pulled it off. If you want to produce icewine today, you will select the varietal with the final product in mind and choose mostly Vidal Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Riesling. Growing icewine is an all-or-nothing gamble, where you need good weather in autumn and freeze at the proper timing. Due to ill weather and necessary cutting out of grapes, which have become ripe too early, you will only get about 10% of the wine you would get in a traditional harvest. You’re well advised to have stronger than usual presses at the ready, as the grapes need to be processed while still being frozen and you would get even less icewine otherwise.
That said, it takes either bad weather (when life hands you lemons, make lemonade) or a lot of planning (including quite a bit of confidence, that the freeze will come in time) to make icewine. It would be interesting to find out which of the above happened here, my guess is the planned scenario. As you are speaking Portuguese, you could e-mail the vineyard and simply ask.
[i]On the other hand please keep the nature of icewine in mind. Icewine is not a simple product to create. Apart from a market demand you’d need quite a bit of planning, as I will point out in the following paragraph. I consider this to be a more likely scenario than an emergency solution due to bad weather.[/i]
bluegrue (10:01:37) :
[i][In order to produce an Icewine, the grapes must be frozen in vineyards still pressed frozen. Thus, the ice is trapped inside the shell, along with seeds and juice is very rich in sugars.
Indeed, we collect only 45% of the grapes, because before the sun rises stopped the harvest. The rest of the grapes were left in the Vineyard.
,,,,,,, including the process of pressing of grapes where you can see that the must was-3C and the ice was inside the shells. For that you must like the idea of it was concentrated, we 338g / L sugar (potential alcohol of 20 %!!!!!!!) My idea is to ferment up to 13% and leave a residual sugar of between 110 and 120g / L .
A hug
Eng Agr. Jefferson Sancineto Nunes “[/i]
Maybe not the best Icewine in the world.
but: is icewine.
Brahmas many Brahmas