Need the perfect bottle to accompany
your spring outing? Pack one of these icewines for a crowning
cap to that gourmet spread.
Lots of important things started as mistakes.
Columbus, for
example, was supposed to be on his way to
India, but America
somehow got in the way. The rest is history. In science, mistakes
are notorious for leading us in new and unpredictable directions.
When an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton's
head, he could have
invented the Tarte Tatin or come up with Murphy's Law. But being
neither a French chef nor an Irish pessimist, Newton took the
occasion to discover gravity.
Mistakes have been instrumental in the history of wine as well. In
fact, wine itself was most likely a mistake: grape juice left in a
goatskin bag that started to ferment. Much later, champagne was
discovered when still wine started to referment inside a tightly
sealed bottle.
The rarity called icewine was originally a mistake, too. According
to one account, it was invented in Franconia,
Germany, when
desperate peasants tried to make wine from grapes frozen by an
unexpected frost during the harvest of 1794. When the grapes were
pressed, most of the water stayed behind in the form of ice. Just a
trickle of rich nectar, too sugary to freeze, went into the wine
vat. The result was dazzling.
With plenty of cold weather to go around, but summers warm enough
to encourage vine growth,
Canada is the perfect place for icewine.
In fact, it's the largest producer of icewine in the world. Here
are three favorites.
INNISKILLIN 1999 RIESLING ICEWINE
($65)
Most of Canada's icewine comes from the Niagara Peninsula, actually
an isthmus between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, broken by Niagara
Falls. Just a few miles to the east of the Falls is Inniskillin, a
winery that has pioneered the development of icewine in North
America.