When temperatures fall below a certain level, the water in the grapes freeze, but not the sugar. Leaving the grapes on the vine into late fall or winter allows for more sugar concentration. It’s also a way to encourage people to hang outside in the winter.” “You can see the vineyard where we harvested the grapes for ice wine and tour the cellar where we focus on the process of making ice wine. “The festival is a great opportunity to see a winery in the winter,” says Kyle Brownley, Chateau Chantal’s director of marketing. The event culminates with a Fire and Ice Wine Dinner, featuring seven courses, each paired with ice wine and other wines, held in the winery’s hospitality room. Guests are also welcome to snowshoe along a trail in the vineyard. The day-long festival, as might be expected, offers tastings of multiple vintages of ice wine, vineyard and wine processing tours, and s’mores, ice sculptures and other activities on its patio, where fire pits will ease the cold. It’s billed as a celebration of the winery’s “unique ability to grow, harvest and produce one of the rarest products in the wine industry.” Chateau Chantal’s Ice Wine Festival takes place Saturday at its estate vineyard on Old Mission Peninsula. The winery has been making ice wine since the early 1990s, and three years ago began an annual celebration of the specialty wine. One of Michigan’s oldest ice wine producers is Chateau Chantal near Traverse City. “Once you try ice wine, you’ll know why people like it,” he adds.
It has good alcohol content, nice acidity and fresh crispness. We make ice wine in the typical German style. “Ice wines comes in all sweetness levels. “They say ice wine is the nectar of the gods,” says Bernd Croissant, long-time winemaker at Chateau Grand Traverse on Old Mission Peninsula near Traverse City. Canada is the world’s biggest producer of ice wine. Michigan, like Ontario and British Columbia, New York’s Finger Lakes and other Great Lakes states, boasts a climate suitable to making one of the world’s riskiest styles of wine. The climate has to be warm enough for grapes to accumulate sugar and to ripen and cold enough for them to freeze. The style has become firmly planted among wineries in Michigan, one of the few regions in the world able to produce ice wine. It’s all part of the mystique - and the allure - of ice wine, a sweet dessert-style wine that traces its modern roots to Germany, where it’s known as eiswein.
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