You Won’t Find This in Napa

Snow swirls thick and rough across the vineyard, and the wind violently slaps the grapes. Farmworkers and winemakers huddle together in the dark field at 5 a.m., relying on layers of flannel and goose down to keep warm as they slog through the thigh-deep snow.

Using the headlights of a nearby tractor to find his way, vintner Anthony Debevc stops at a cluster of grapes, yanks off his ski gloves and gently runs his fingers over the fruit. Each grape feels as hard as a marble.

“It’s time to harvest!” Debevc shouts. “The grapes are ready!”

Unlike their peers in California, whose livelihood can be lost when the temperature plummets, a growing number of winemakers in the Midwest are leveraging their harsh winters into the flourishing business of ice wine, a sweet alcoholic beverage that relies on grapes freezing solid on the vine.

Ice wine, or Eiswein, is thought to have originated in Germany in the late 18th century, when monks tried to salvage their late-harvest grapes after an unexpected deep frost. They discovered that the cycle of freezing and thawing had concentrated the sugars and flavors of the fruit. Because the grapes had time to age and to slowly dehydrate, the fruit’s sugar levels skyrocketed and its water content dropped. When the grapes were pressed, what little water remained had frozen, and was easily squeezed out and discarded.

The same process is used today. If the winemaker is lucky, each grape will give a single drop of golden, sugary juice.

“Where there is cold and there are grapes, there likely will be ice wine,” said Bruce Sanderson, senior editor and tasting director for Wine Spectator magazine.

It’s not clear whether ice wine sales are tracked in the U.S., because it’s such a small part of the wine industry and because weather can play havoc with the supply. The Canadian province of Ontario consistently produces more ice wine than anywhere else, shipping its products to restaurants, specialty wine shops and grocery stores worldwide. Yet it only averages $30.7 million worth of ice wine each year, said Linda Watts, export and public relations coordinator for the Wine Council of Ontario.

Although a relatively small business, the specialty drink is gaining attention, Watts says.

The buzz started in the 1980s, when the industry migrated from Europe and into the Niagara region of southern Ontario. As operations ramped up there, winemakers in the United States began to take notice and set up their own operations in New York state, Washington state and, in recent years, the Midwest.

Minnesota and Illinois have wineries that produce ice wine, while Michigan has at least a half dozen companies in the field. In Ohio, over the last three years, a dozen wineries have started making this lushly acidic drink that typically carries hints of apricot and melon.

Some of the appeal is profit: Bottles of ice wine, which hold about half the volume of a traditional table wine, can sell for $75 and more at retail stores.

Such revenue comes at incredible risk. Leave the grapes on the vine too long, and birds can pick the plants clean. Have too warm a winter, and the fruit will fall to the ground and rot.

The allure of ice wine gathered such momentum in the U.S. that a number of wineries in California and elsewhere tried to work around the risks: They picked their grapes earlier in the season, chilled them in commercial freezers and called the resulting product ice wine.

Last spring, however, federal regulators put a stop to that. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau issued a reprimand to the industry and amended its rules: Only grapes that freeze on the vine can carry the lauded title of “ice wine.”

“If you take the gamble, you should reap the rewards. But you have to take the gamble,” said Debevc, who started making his white ice wines two years ago. Now, sales of ice wine make up almost 2% of all revenue for Debonne Vineyards, Debevc’s privately held winery in Madison, about 45 miles northeast of Cleveland.

That’s small compared to the far stronger sales of Debonne’s Riesling, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay. But the potential for growth in ice wine is huge, said Debevc, who plans to double his production next year. Debonne’s ice wine wholesales for $8 to $10, and retails for $30 a bottle.

“We need to tap into something that makes us stand out -- and makes sense out here in the snow,” said Debevc, 56, whose father, wife, daughter and son-in-law all work at the winery.

For nearly four generations, the Debevc family has plowed these rolling hills along the southern shores of Lake Erie, coaxing fruit from the heavy clay soil. Their neighbors were immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, farmers who brought a heritage of sweet wines to the locals. Before the California Gold Rush, Ohio was the nation’s leading producer of wines and was known for its pink Catawba grapes.

Home of Cold Duck

During Prohibition, Ohio vintners struggled to survive. Some farmers pulled out their varietals and planted Concord grapes. Such blue-black-skinned fruit was then used in jelly and juice that included instructions on “how not to make wine.” Other vintners became bootleggers. Debevc’s grandfather sold his wine to local churches and “enough on the side to make the mortgage,” Debevc said.

It would take decades for the Ohio wine industry to crawl back to full strength, in part because the vineyards were in disrepair. Even then, vintners said, most wines leaned toward the sugary side: Meier’s Wine Cellars, the state’s largest winery, helped cement that reputation when its Cold Duck sparkling wine became popular in the late 1960s.

Most Ohio wineries today remain unknown nationally. Local vintners started looking into ice wine in the late 1990s after several producers contacted friends in Canada -- which has weather patterns similar to the Midwest’s -- in search of ideas to expand their business.

“Part of the problem is, Ohio wines have a horrible reputation,” said Donniella Winchell, executive director of the Ohio Wine Producers Assn. “If you had a bad glass of wine, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, chances are it came from Ohio.”

At the time, many of the wines were made out of the area’s long-standing concord grapes. Such super-sweet grapes, said Winchell, didn’t necessarily make the best wine.

As the years passed, some farmers began to rip out their concord grapes and plant varietals such as chardonnay, riesling, pinot gris and cabernet franc in hopes of making fine wines and competing against the California giants. Less than five miles away from Lake Erie, rows of delicate merlot grapes are nestled near fields of the hardier vidal blanc.

“By the time we got into the early ‘90s, and our wines were getting good, the market had exploded,” Winchell said. “No one knew about us, and no one wanted to.”

All the wine talk revolved around California’s Napa Valley. Sensing an opportunity, startup ventures from around the world clamored at the chance to tap into a market that annually pulls in about $20 billion in U.S. retail sales. Ohio generates about $85 million worth of wine each year.

Fueled by the growing global taste for wine, thousands of wineries fought to put their bottles onto limited store space. The frenzy led to market chaos.

By the mid-1990s, the industry had started to consolidate, and small companies found themselves squeezed out by larger rivals. Today, the 50 largest American wineries -- including Meier’s in Silverton, Ohio -- produce about 90% of all U.S. wine sold. “If you’re a small winery, when you go out into the real world, you are going to be dwarfed by the economics of scale and marketing,” said Jim Lapsley, an adjunct associate professor of viticulture at UC Davis.

“If you’re going to stand out, if you’re going to survive, you need to make something that’s unique and will generate interest,” said Lapsley, who wrote “Bottled Poetry: Napa Winemaking From Prohibition to the Modern Era.” “Ice wine is that.”

The Big Gamble

Frost clings to the tips of Tina Fowler’s eyelashes as she slowly makes her way up the rows of Debevc’s vines. The assistant vineyard manager’s gloves are so thick that she can barely flex her fingers. Thin plastic netting surrounds each plant and is used to catch fruit that has fallen prematurely. Gently, Fowler pulls back the netting and scoops out the ripe fruit.

Many of the local winemakers, including Debevc, favor vidal blanc grapes for their ice wine because they have a thicker skin that clings to the vine tendrils longer than some of the other varietals.

“The longer the grapes can stay on the vine, the less fruit we’ll lose during the season,” says Gene Sigel, vineyard manager for Debonne Vineyards, as he watches the harvest. “Vidal blanc may not be the most complex grape, but it’s one of the hardiest. That’s what we need in this business.”

Tapping the plant softly with the edge of her hand, Fowler loosens the snow from the vines and awkwardly grabs one cluster of tan-colored grapes. With a slow twist, the fruit comes free and she dumps it into a plastic bin. As the containers fill, Sigel and his staff quickly collect the bins and race them to the winery’s pressing room.

Making ice wine is all about gambling -- harvesting at exactly the right time of year, under the precise weather conditions and at the ideal temperature for the fruit. It takes a full day of weather in the low 20s to initially freeze the water and the juice into crystals. It then needs to get to 17 degrees or colder to allow the sugar levels in the grapes to reach the appropriate level. When the shriveled and hardened fruit hits the press, the grapes’ temperature should stay within a three-degree window: 15 to 17 degrees.

Any colder, and the grape is too hard to yield much juice. Any warmer, and the juice will be diluted with too much water.

Right now, Debevc’s grapes are about 3 degrees too cold. Mountains of snow-covered fruit are piled outside a concrete warehouse, waiting to be warmed. Workers haul the crates inside one by one, stumbling into each other due to the wind and their worry.

“Put the grapes in the press,” Debevc said. “We’ll keep pressing until it’s right.”

Hours pass and the room warms, so slightly that only the grapes can tell. Juice oozes out of the groaning wooden machines and into metal bins large enough for a grown man to lie down. The texture is thick and rich, like golden nectar.

When the fermentation is complete, and the juice is funneled into slender bottles months from now, Debonne will sell the ice wine here at the winery, at specialty wine shops throughout the state and at high-end restaurants. Many of Ohio’s other ice wine makers follow a similar pattern, saying they can barely keep up with local demand, let alone worry about distributing the wine more widely.

In Short Supply

There will be even fewer bottles of Ohio ice wine this year because the Debevcs have fewer grapes to press. A long, warm winter and strong winds left much of the family’s crop lying on the ground, a feast for the tiny black starlings and other local birds.

Five tons of grapes were all that remained, less than one-third of what the Debevc family had set aside for ice wine. If the family were using the grapes to make a typical table wine, they could squeeze 850 gallons of juice from this fruit.

But with the frozen grapes, they’ll get about 300 gallons, or 3,000 half-bottles.

Debonne Vineyards is not alone in facing a tight year. The nearby Ferrante Winery lost 50% of its ice wine crop, and “that’s going to hurt,” said owner Nick Ferrante. “We had wanted to make 1,000 gallons, and we were lucky to get 500 gallons out.”

All but two of Michigan’s wineries lost their ice wine crop, and what grapes remained yielded about 10% of what the wineries produced a year earlier. Similar losses were felt elsewhere around the Great Lakes area.

Sigel, the Debonne Vineyards manager, owns a small winery just down the road from his employer. This winter, he lost his entire personal ice wine crop.

“It hurts, but I won’t stop,” said Sigel, whose winery is called South River Vineyards. “Next year, there will be grapes. Next year, there will be better weather. All I can do is hope and pray for the cold.”