#48 Try Icewine

When I put this one on the list, I was thinking that icewine was strictly a wintery kind of drink, and I fully expected to be drinking it from a giant snifter by a roaring fire, while snow falls softly on a deer outside my window and I mumble things like “hummm, this vintage has a bouquet of Nordic lignonberry and freshly zamboni’d ice, n’est pas?”

That’s not how it happened. This week (as I’ll be mentioning in a future post) my friend who has been living in Japan is home for vacation, and at her reunion sleepover party (yes, we had a sleepover party, yes, we are 25. This is how we do.) she brought a bottle of icewine she’d recently purchased on a Niagara wine tour with her mom. Icewine is definitely not something you’d commonly find in Japan, so she wanted to get some before heading back.

It was a mild August evening, not a chilly February night. We sat on Sarah’s big cushy livingroom couch watching “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” on her big screen, with a box of cold Little Caesar’s $5 pepperoni pizza in front of us. And we all sipped little tasters of ice wine from various novelty shot glasses in Sarah’s collection.

Wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Turns out that Icewine is pretty delicious. For those who may not know, icewine is made in places where it gets cold enough for the grapes to freeze on the vine. And…the freezing makes it sweeter somehow. I don’t know, not a wine-eologist. It’s almost syrupy with how sweet it is, like maple syrup made from grapes. I would not have wanted a big snifter of it – it is meant for little sips, I think. It’s expensive, and it comes in skinny little bottles that don’t hold all that much, but I’d buy it for a special occasion, whatever the season.