From an Icy Vineyard, An Extravagant Encore

JORDAN, Ontario -- It's almost midnight. Snow flurries ride down on the breath of a starless sky, and the 15-degree air pricks at bare skin. It's a perfect time, Len Pennachetti concludes, to go out in a field and pick grapes.

He has been waiting for this night for nearly three months, since the autumn harvest crews plucked most of the fat, juicy grapes from the vines, leaving only 29 rows wrapped in birdproof nets.

The remaining fruit shriveled and turned brown. Maddeningly, it did not freeze. In this part of Canada, boys glumly regarded hockey ponds still liquid. Skis stayed in closets. Two days earlier, as though flaunting the warm spree, the clouds opened up -- with rain.

But the weird downpour seemed finally to awaken winter. Its roaring return froze the raindrops on the stems, turning vineyards into fields of glass sculptures. The grapes became hard, sweet marbles. And Pennachetti came to reap his ice wine.

"Ice wine is the prize," said the 52-year-old winemaker, president of Cave Spring Cellars winery. "It's hard. It's difficult. But we'd be foolish not to grow it."

He gathered with a small knot of men, flashlights probing the ice-crusted clusters of grapes. Only a few years ago, the occasion would bring dozens of workers to the fields, laboring in brutal cold to handpick the grapes.

But now, worker Craig Schmidt climbs atop a large yellow harvesting machine, raising the platform so the machine straddles a row of Riesling grapes. It clatters slowly down the row, shaking the brittle vines with a series of metal paddles and catching the grapes as they fall.

This bounty will create a wine that is becoming a signature product for Canada. As the grapes are squeezed by a hydraulic Italian press in a wooden vat, the frozen water remains with the discarded skin. What drains out is an intensely sweet juice that is fermented into a pricey wine found on the desert lists of the finest restaurants.

"People get it. It's not counterintuitive for Canada" like growing other wines, Pennachetti says. "They say: 'Oh, you're from Canada. The one thing you ought to know how to grow is something called ice wine.' It's like hockey and igloos. It's become our new maple syrup."

His humor contains a whiff of regret. He is proud of the ice wine, which is good enough to sell for $52 (U.S.) for a half-bottle. But he considers his fields' best offerings to be table wines, the Rieslings, and chardonnays and pinot noirs. This protected Niagara region on the south shore of Lake Ontario, and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, produce table wines good enough to muscle aside the likes of California, France and New Zealand in wine competition.

That is a personal victory for Pennachetti. As he walks behind the harvester, fretting over the few clusters of grapes missed by the machine, the ghost of his grandfather Giuseppe is by his shoulder. The old man, an immigrant from Italy, recruited 10-year-old Leonard to help with his winemaking hobby after retiring from the brickmaking business.

Leonard helped to clear the overgrown vines, harvest and press the grapes, and fill the table bottles with the wine, the only beverage other than ginger ale served at his grandfather's house. In high school, a geography teacher lectured on the advantages of the Niagara region for winegrowing. Poring over a topographical map, young Pennachetti picked his ideal spot for a winery -- an old farm called Cave Spring.