Canada's Most Famous Wine

When he launched Willow Hill Vineyards in 2002, Oliver, B.C.-based grape grower Lanny Swanky decided to produce only icewine and late harvest wines.

He didn’t think there was much point in entering the already-crowded and competitive table wine category. “I’m always looking for an edge,” he says.

He has a point. Today, even when our table wines are accepted on merit, icewine remains the Canadian icon that gives all our wines an edge around the world. Almost always a well-made premium wine, icewine gained international acclaim long before anyone outside Canada took our table wines seriously.

That’s why, for many wineries, icewine is a critical part of the business plan. Ontario’s Royal DeMaria Wines and British Columbia’s Paradise Ranch have a similar focus to Willow Hill. Icewine is a primary revenue generator for at least half a dozen producers and a significant one for others. Yet out of the 300 or so wineries in Canada, a minority make it.

“It is amazing to me and to my employer that so few wineries concentrate on icewine,” says Sue-Ann Staff, the winemaker at Pillitteri Estate Winery in Virgil, Ontario.

Pillitteri is one of Canada’s largest icewine producers; a third of its case production is high-value icewine. In the bounteous 2004 vintage, they made 138,000 litres.

To put it into a startling context, that is about half the average annual Eiswein production of Austria, one of the world’s big three in icewine. Germany and Canada are the world’s other two significant icewine producers. German production has ballooned only recently to Canadian levels, as surplus wine grapes have been diverted to Eiswein.

Icewine is essentially made by pressing the juice from grapes frozen on the vines. It achieved its stature as an icon and a saviour of Canadian wineries over a period of about 20 years, a period in which Canada emerged as the world’s largest icewine producer. In 2004, Ontario vineyards produced a record 900,170 litres of icewine juice. No figures are available for British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Quebec, but these jurisdictions (mainly British Columbia) likely produce between 100,000 and 150,000 litres annually.

The world’s first icewine, according to commonly accepted references in Germany, was made in 1794 in the German wine region of Franconia, near the city of Wurzburg. It was, of course, an accident. Unseasonably early frost caught grapes still hanging on the vines. Undeterred, the unnamed enterprising vintner pressed the grapes and the result was an excellent dessert wine. Icewine remained an accident of early winter until 1965 when a big wine estate on the Rhine, the Hessiche Staatsweingüter, began protecting the grapes against predators and the elements with nets and plastic sheets. By the early 1980s, planned Eiswein production was routine in most German wine regions.

The idea was spread by German-trained and German-speaking vintners. Weingut Hafner claims to have made Austria’s first Eiswein in 1971. The knowledge came to Canada with the late Walter Hainle, a former Hamburg textile salesman who immigrated here in 1970. A home winemaker, he made the Okanagan’s first icewine in 1973 from purchased grapes, and continued doing so after planting his own vineyard near Peachland. When he and his son, Tilman, opened Hainle Vineyards in 1988, they were able to offer icewines starting with the 1978 vintage. Hainle Estate Winery continues to be a niche icewine producer.
Ontario’s first commercial icewines were made in 1983 by the Pelee Island Winery near Windsor and by Hillebrand near Niagara-on-the-Lake. The beginning involved a group of German-speaking vintners and growers, all friends of Karl Kaiser, the co-founder of Inniskillin Wines Inc. The others were Walter Strehn, then general manager of Pelee Island (and, like Kaiser, an Austrian), German-born Ewald Reif, who grew grapes next door to Inniskillin, and the winemakers at Hillebrand, including a legendary German consultant named Bernhard Breuer.

They decided to make icewine in the fall of 1983. Only Pelee Island netted its vines against birds. Even then, the winery lost most of its grapes when conservation officers took the nets down when they spotted that birds were being trapped in the open weave. Strehn made only a small volume of icewine and, to make matters worse, had to fight off a prosecution for illegal trapping. He did better than either Kaiser or Reif, who lost all of their unprotected crop to the birds.

All of these producers deployed nets in the 1984 vintage. (With a tighter weave, Pelee Island’s nets stopped trapping birds.) Hillebrand, as Kaiser later sniffed, “chickened out” by picking its grapes before too many were consumed by birds. The grapes were refrigerated, brought outside later when it was cold enough to freeze them naturally, and then pressed the juice.

Making icewine like that would not be allowed today, when grapes must be frozen to at least -8˚C on the vine before being picked. There were no regulations in 1983. With Kaiser making icewine in every vintage since 1984, Inniskillin has become Canada’s best-known icewine producer and, as a result, the best-known Canadian winery in the world.
Arguably, Inniskillin put Canadian wine on the map when its 1989 Vidal Icewine won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at the 1991 VinExpo competition in Bordeaux.

The defining grape of Canadian icewine is vidal, a white French hybrid grown extensively in Ontario. Varieties suitable for icewine are those that hang tenaciously on the vines well into winter, that have thick skins to retain the juice and that preserve high acidity. In Germany and Austria, the chief Eiswein varieties are riesling, gruner veltliner and scheurebe. Vidal was among the French hybrids brought to Ontario in the 1940s for table wine. Today, other varieties are preferred for table wines but vidal, because of its use in icewine, remains about 20 per cent of Ontario’s average annual grape crop. Because it grows in vineyards that are marginal for vinifera, more could be planted if necessary.

Most Canadian icewine is exported, with key markets being Asia and places that see many Asian tourists, like Hawaii. Sales to the United States are rising and some European markets have been opened recently.

At home, however, this wine remains underappreciated. “I think Canadians buy icewine and then they don’t drink it,” laments Pillitteri’s Staff. “I think there is a lot in people’s cellars, used for different things like making jellies, when they have a few extra bottles and don’t know what to do with them, which is unfortunate.”

Vancouver writer and wine judge, John Schreiner, has written extensively on Canadian wines for 30 years. He is the author of several bestsellers, including The Wineries of British Columbia. In 2002, the Okanagan Wine Festivals Society recognized Schreiner with its annual Founder’s Award.
This article originally appeared in Wine Access' 2006 Canadian Wine Annual.