Wine · Terminology

Eiswein

Wine from grapes frozen solid on the vine, pressed while frozen so the water stays behind as ice.

Eiswein — icewine in Canada — is made from grapes left on the vine into deep winter and picked while frozen solid, then pressed still frozen. The water in each berry stays behind as ice; what runs out is a tiny quantity of intensely concentrated juice, high in both sugar and acidity.

It is not a botrytis wine. The German and Austrian rules require healthy, unbotrytised fruit — the concentration comes purely from freezing. That gives Eiswein its signature: piercing, pure, almost electric acidity underneath the sweetness.

In practice

  • Germany and Austria require the grapes to be picked and pressed at −7 °C or colder; Canada's VQA standard is −8 °C.
  • Harvest happens at night or before dawn, often in December or January, and occasionally not at all — the crop is simply lost if the freeze never comes.
  • Yields are minuscule: a fraction of a normal crop, which is why bottles are small and expensive.
  • Machine-frozen grapes ("cryoextraction") make a different, non-Eiswein product and may not use the name in the EU or Canada.

Where you'll meet it

  • Germany and Austria, from Riesling above all.
  • Canada — Niagara and the Okanagan — now the world's largest producer, largely from Vidal and Riesling.
  • Increasingly rarely in Germany, where warm winters have wiped out whole vintages.

Eiswein against the other sweet wines

Eiswein Noble rot Passito
Concentration by Freezing on the vine Fungal dehydration Drying after picking
Fruit health Must be clean Deliberately rotted Clean, then raisined
Acidity Very high, preserved High but softened Moderate
Aroma Pure, primary fruit — lime, peach Honey, saffron, apricot Raisin, fig, nut
Risk The freeze may never come Rot may turn grey Rot in the drying loft

A style under threat

German Eiswein depends on a reliable hard freeze arriving before the fruit rots or falls. Warming winters have made that increasingly unreliable — in some recent vintages no German producer made any at all. Canada's continental winters remain dependable, which is why the centre of gravity has shifted west.

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