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Inniskillin VIDAL Icewine 2001

Appellation:
VQA Niagara Peninsula

Viticulture/Grape:
100% Vidal

Producer:
Inniskillin Winery, Niagara Peninsula, Ontario, Canada

Winemaker:
Karl J. Kaiser

Awards:
ICEWINE INFO Novovino Award

Tasting notes:
An alluring medley of fresh lychee nut, tangerine, nectarine, and peach gently drizzled with clover honey. Offering a multitude of layered flavours, both luscious and invigorating. Truly an exquisite experience, like biting into a fresh nectarine with bounce back acidity that lasts forever.Food Pairing Suggestions: Fruit based desserts, Foie Gras - pan seared or terrine, and spiced Asian cuisine, and a wide range of cheeses. Longevity: Enjoy now through 2010. Serving Temperature: 5—9°C. (Maria Moessner, Inniskillin Estate Sommelier)

The Expert’s Opinion:
n/a

Enjoy with / Food Pairing:
Pear tart, apple cake, fresh peaches, Roquefort cheese, and foie gras

Vintage Information:
Inniskillin took the ”high road” by waiting a long time during the late winter for the proper temperatures to produce its exquisite Icewines. Although volume was less than what we aimed for, quality is superb from the 2001 Icewine vintage. In the past, we have experienced our share of challenges with each Icewine harvest, but nothingcompares to the difficulty of the 2001 vintage. Depending on the location and the site in the Niagara Peninsula, temperatures of –9.0°C or –10.0°C were so infrequent and forecasts so wrong that many times the harvest had to be called off during the middle of the night and the people had to be sent home. There was not a single daytime cold enough, only nighttime’s to pick Icewine. Even in these cases only a few nights provided a few hours of cold, which extended our harvest period from December 27th, 2001 to March 5th, 2002. Truly an exhausting vintage for all our production team. Luckily during all this time we had seven presses available to pressthe grapes swiftly in the few hours available.

Winemaker’s Notes:
The harvest occurs at the pinnacle of Canada’s crisp winter. Exceptional grapes, naturally frozen on the vine, are delicately hand-picked and carefully pressed throughout the night. Grapes, pickedfrozen solid from the vines, were manually loaded into the presses without de-stemming or crushing, and were pressed at an ambient temperature of -10°C or colder. This technique yields only a fraction of the normal yield (approximately 10 - 20%) as most of the naturalwater portion of the juice remains in the press in the form of ice crystals. During the pressing the water in the grapes remains frozen as ice crystals, and is easily extracted from the juice. What remains are a few precious drops of silky sweet unadulterated liquid. Once guided through our arduous fermentation, the resulting wine can only be hailed as the Nectar of the Gods.





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