Steve Pfost for The New York TimesDan Stouck, center, was among the volunteers picking grapes recently at Malivoire Wine Company in Beamsville, Ontario. 
Beamsville, Ontario
The grapes are pressed shortly after being picked, releasing sweet, concentrated juices. IT is 14 degrees above zero as a group of wine lovers converges in a vineyard on the Niagara Peninsula. Frosty bundles of Riesling grapes hang on rows of vines in the pale, gathering daylight. A storm the night before has left behind six inches of fresh snow.
Perfect conditions, the winemaker Shiraz Mottiar declares, for picking the frozen grapes that he will soon transform into Canada’s specialty, ice wine, for his employer, Malivoire Wine Company. By law, Canadian ice-wine makers cannot call their product by that name unless it is made from grapes picked off the vine at or below -8 Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit). So far, so good. Mr. Mottiar is confident that the temperature will hold, at least for a few hours, and instructs the group to get to work. What is ideal for the harvest, though, is not so great for human extremities.
“My feet are very cold now,” said Peter Scott, who woke up at 4:45 a.m. to make the hour-and-10-minute drive from Toronto with his wife, Jessica Dolman. This is the fourth year of picking for the couple, who, like the other 25 or so loyal Malivoire customers bending intently over their work, are not paid for their labor. They will, however, receive a free bottle of ice wine with their names listed among the workers on the 2010 vintage label. After the harvest they’ll also be invited back inside the winery, where the proprietor, Martin Malivoire, has been preparing vats of hot chocolate and chili spiked with ice wine.
“The whole experience is very addictive,” Ms. Dolman said.
Among devotees in North America, this stretch of flat farmland bordered by Lake Ontario to the north and Lake Erie to the south is ground zero for indulging a taste for ice wine, a sweet wine that is often paired with dessert, rich cheeses and foie gras. Canada vies with Germany for the title of world’s largest producer of ice wine — some years, because of inconsistent weather, Germany’s crop is small or nonexistent. (Austria, Switzerland and New York’s Finger Lakes are among the many areas that also make ice wine.)
More than 75 percent of all the ice wine in Canada comes from Ontario. (The remainder is made in regions like southern Quebec and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.) Unlike more temperate parts of the world, Canada has consistently cold winters, which guarantee an annual crop of frozen grapes. Still, ice wine represents just a small percentage of wine being produced here. It’s expensive to make: a ton of grapes yields only one-sixth the amount of ice wine as table wine — hence its nickname, liquid gold — and its prices start at $50 for a half-bottle. Leaving grapes on the vine long past normal fall harvest also is risky.
“There are all kinds of hazards,” said Norman D. Beal, a former oil trader who in 2000 turned a decrepit barn into an opulent tasting room at his Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery on a hill in Beamsville. “There are the birds, mildew, all kinds of diseases.” That’s in addition to the vagaries of the weather, including rain, hail, ice storms and midwinter thaws.
Extreme wine making, as some call ice-wine production, calls for extreme wine touring. In winter that means lots of layers, and maybe a face mask with an opening big enough for sipping. The trade-offs: there’s plenty of room to belly up to the tasting bars, and it’s easier to get a table at one of the region’s many fine restaurants.
Each tasting inevitably leads to a game of identifying classic ice-wine flavors: lychee nut, caramel, toffee, strawberry jam, crème brûlée, burnt orange, citrus, tropical fruit. Then what follows is a discussion of the improbable alchemy that goes into producing a drink that is said to have been created by mistake in a German vineyard in 1794.
Ice-wine makers here like to leave the grapes on the vine through a series of mild freezes and thaws instead of picking at the first opportunity. That process produces the right balance of sweetness, acidity and the nuanced flavors that separate great ice wine from something that is cloyingly sweet.
“You’re always watching the sugar and acid levels,” Mr. Mottiar said. “Once they peak, then you pick and press.” The ice-wine harvest usually doesn’t occur until well into December, and in some years it has stretched into February.
When the frozen grapes are pressed at just the right temperature, usually immediately after picking, the water is crystallized, and the juice that remains consists of the most exquisitely concentrated sugars and flavors.
Correction: An earlier version of a photo caption on this article misspelled the name of the town where volunteers were picking grapes. As correctly noted elsewhere in the article, it is Beamsville, not Bearnsville.
