“Tons of flavor” stem from ice wine harvest in N.Y.

branchport, n.y.» Winter finally came down hard on New York’s Finger Lakes this month with single-digit temperatures at dawn and fresh snow blowing over the rolling vineyards.

The wait was over for an ice wine harvest.

Thick-gloved workers briskly picked frozen bunches of grapes that would be pressed into extra-sweet juice within hours out in the cold air. Hunt Country Vineyards makes a sweet wine that has become a specialty for vineyards dotting upstate New York hillsides — albeit one dependent on the increasingly noticeable vagaries of winter.

“It’s like biting into the finest sorbet,” vineyard owner Art Hunt said after taking off a glove to taste a grape. “Just tons of flavor.”

Ice wine harvests are a far cry from travelogue images of grapes ripening under a radiant sun. These grapes are left on the vine through at least the fall. When temperatures get low enough to freeze the water in the grapes, winemakers pounce.

The grapes with ice crystals in them yield a thicker, more concentrated juice — about 38 percent sugar compared with 22 percent for juice used to make white table wines. The resulting wine is sweeter, heavier and — because of the extra work to produce it — often pricier.

Ice wine has a long history in Germany and is big in Canada, but it remains a small niche in the multibillion-dollar U.S. wine industry, confined mostly to upstate New York, Ohio and Michigan.

The Finger Lakes, New York’s highest-profile winemaking region, has had more than about a half-dozen wineries devoting some acreage to ice wines. Vineyards closer to lakes Erie and Ontario have also produced ice wines.