Freezing temperatures may not be cold enough for icewine grape harvest

Conditions Sunday night weren’t expected to be cold enough for long enough

A bitterly cold but fleeting forecast low of -9 C might not have been enough to trigger the icewine harvest last night in Kelowna vineyards.

Grapes left out for the lucrative production of icewine are normally plucked from the vines when temperatures drop to -8 C.

But conditions were only expected to be that bone-chilling for an hour or so, which wouldn’t have given the grapes the frozen solidity makers of icewine desire.

“The grapes have to be so solid you can hardly squeeze them with your fingers,” Willem Semmelink, vineyard manager at Summerhill Pyramid Winery on Lakeshore Road, said earlier Sunday.

“The temperatures might only reach minus eight or nine for an hour or two, and the grapes don’t freeze well enough at that short a time,” Semmelink said.

But Summerhill’s vineyards are fairly close to lake level, where overnight temperatures are milder than at higher elevations. At some wineries higher up in the hills, expectations were for a longer cold snap that might allow the icewine harvest to take place.

In upper West Kelowna, Kalala Organic Estate Winery has set aside a portion of its crop for icewine. The operators are hoping to repeat the success of past years, when their icewine won the highest number of points at the Chardonnay de Monde competition in France.

But no matter how cold it got in their vineyard, or for how long, they weren’t planning on taking off the grapes last night.

“This cold weather has come a little earlier than we expected, and we’re just not ready,” said winery representative Victoria Cianciolo. “Plus, a lot of our equipment is frozen.”

For icewine, grapes are harvested when the water in the berries, but not the sugars, has frozen. The process yields a relatively small amount of extremely sweet juice, with the resulting bottles of icewine selling for far more than most other wines.

The icewine harvest at most vineyards is a quick picking and pressing affair, aided by parka-clad volunteers who happily come out in the middle of the night for the experience.

“We’ve been making calls to the 20 or so people who said they’d be willing to help out, asking them to be ready,” said Leo Gebert, a co-owner of St. Hubertus Estate Winery. “We’ll have a sleepless night, but whether it gets cold enough for the harvest, we’ll have to wait and see.”

About five per cent of the grape crop at St. Hubertus has been left out for icewine. Gebert said this is the earliest potential icewine harvest he can recall.

Leaving the grapes out beyond the first cold snap can be risky for wineries, as it increases the chance the fruit will be eaten by birds, deer or bears.

About two dozen Okanagan wineries made icewine last year, according to the B.C. Wine Authority, which oversees the process to ensure all relevant regulations are followed.