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http:// --> Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad Top Galleries: February 20, 2007 From an icy vineyard, an extravagant encore By Doug Struck The Washington Post Associated Press Rain from a mild season is caught by the belated arrival of winter, turning vineyards in the Niagara region of Canada into a tableau of ice sculptures and freezing the grapes into hard, sweet marbles that produce an intense flavor. Here, ice-covered vines at the Cave Spring Cellars winery in 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 along 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. 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. More than three decades later, Pennachetti and his wife, Helen Young, brother Thomas and winemaker Angelo Pavan, a childhood friend, have turned Cave Spring into a premier winery, an estate with an elegant restaurant, a country inn, a spa and a block of boutique stores. But the geography of his high school topographic map — framed by his office — still captivates Pennachetti. It is the land that Pennachetti is trying to bottle. "The soul of the wine is in the dirt," he said. "We don't make wine. We grow it. And where do you start? In the geography. In the ground. You express a place in it. The prize is to find a wine that is noble and give it a local twist." Earlier, in his restaurant, Pennachetti had mused over glasses with samples of his favorite wine. "It takes 10 years to really understand that vine that you put in the ground today," he said. "That's so unusual in this world of instant gratification. I stuck these vines in the ground in 1978, with my own hands, and we are sitting here 29 years later drinking the wine." In the vineyard, the harvester — "The shaker," they call it — is idling as the men sort out kinks in the ropes that hold the grape nets, balky with crusted ice. The cellphone of Kevin Latter, the vineyard manager, rings. It's the wine cellar calling with chemical tests of the first grapes brought in from the field. The men hold their breath. The key ingredient is the sugar. The colder it is, the higher the sugar content of the juice. They need at least 32 percent. They get 40. "Beautiful," exalts Pennachetti, the vapor of his breath rising in the lights of the harvester. "Perfect." The weather had teased, but in the end delivered. It looks like the makings of a good year. Leave a Comment: Advertisement: Advertisement: Paid Advertising: Debt Help Inkjet Printers Payday Loans Free Ringtones Debt Consolidation Security Systems Debt Relief New Hampshire Primary Advertisement: Copyright © 2007 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved. Del.icio.us