Three days of icewine in Niagara, in the week it finally got cold

There is a straightforward reason to go to Niagara in December rather than in August, and it is not the scenery, although the scenery is better than anyone tells you. It is that the wine the region is actually famous for is a winter wine, and in winter the people who make it are standing behind the counter with nothing much to do.

We landed in Buffalo on 14 December, crossed at the Rainbow Bridge, and spent three days visiting sixteen wineries between the Niagara River and the Beamsville Bench.

The rule that makes the wine

Ontario icewine is governed by VQA, and the rule that matters is this: the grapes must freeze on the vine, naturally, and be harvested and pressed at minus eight degrees Celsius or colder. No freezers, no cryoextraction, no shortcuts. A panel tastes every lot before it can carry the name.

That single sentence explains almost everything about the category. It explains why picking happens at three in the morning in January. It explains why the press yields so little, because most of the water in the berry stays behind as ice and only the concentrated syrup runs. And it explains the price of a 375ml bottle, which routinely matches a full bottle of good dry wine.

It also explains why Ontario, and not Germany, now makes most of the world’s icewine. The Rheingau invented Eiswein. It also, increasingly, fails to get cold enough to make it. Niagara has the opposite situation: the freeze is dependable, and the difficulty is keeping fruit in good enough condition through November and December to survive until it comes.

Day one, the river

Stratus first, on Niagara Stone Road. It is the most deliberately designed room of the trip, built as a gravity-flow winery and certified to LEED standard, and the house philosophy is assemblage rather than varietal bottling. A 2024 Riesling Icewine was open.

Then Inniskillin, which is where the story starts. Donald Ziraldo and Karl Kaiser were granted the first Ontario winery licence issued since Prohibition, in 1975. In 1991 their 1989 Vidal Icewine won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at Vinexpo, and Canadian icewine stopped being a curiosity and became an export category. The winery is built around a Douglas-fir barn standing in the snow, and out front there is a stack of barrel heads carrying the medals.

Reif Estate is four minutes down the Niagara Parkway. The Reif family made wine at Neustadt in the Pfalz for thirteen generations before Ewald Reif bought land here in the 1970s. Their tasting menu is the best-designed document we saw anywhere on the trip: every wine annotated for residual sugar against a published five-band scale, and marked drink now, drink or hold, or hold. More wineries should do this. The dessert wines ran Vidal Select Late Harvest, Vidal Icewine, Grand Reserve Riesling Icewine, and Vinea.

Day one ended watching the sun go down over the vines from a gate on John Street East.

Day two, the bench

This is the day that changes your mind about Ontario.

Everything on day one was on the flat land near the water, which is warm, which is why the icewine houses are there. Day two was spent on the Niagara Escarpment, on the terraces below the ridge, and the wines are a different proposition: cooler sites, better drainage, clay over limestone, and Riesling that holds its acid.

Thirty Bench on Mountainview Road bottles three adjacent Riesling blocks separately under its Small Lot label, on the grounds that they do not taste the same, and standing in the vineyard looking at them it is not a hard argument to accept.

Cave Spring has built a tasting room that stands out in the middle of the vineyard, glazed on three sides, so you taste looking at the rows the wine came from. The estate has been making the case for Beamsville Bench Riesling since 1986, and CSV is the bottling that carries it.

Then west and south: Tawse at Vineland, farmed organically and biodynamically with a six-level gravity-flow cellar cut into the slope. Vieni up on Fly Road at Lincoln, working with appassimento and traditional-method sparkling. Vineland Estates, founded in 1979 by Hermann Weis of St. Urbans-Hof in the Mosel, who brought his own Riesling selection with him; the clone is called Weis 21B and it is now planted right across the province.

And last, Sue-Ann Staff at Jordan, on land the family has farmed since 1807, on a road named Staff Avenue. A Bernese mountain dog holds the door. This was the longest stop of the day and nobody was in a hurry.

Day three, Niagara-on-the-Lake

Pillitteri is the largest estate icewine producer in the world and still family run, and the range is the most interesting thing about it. Seven Family Reserve bottlings were out together: Vidal 2016, Gewürztraminer 2017, Riesling 2019, Cabernet Sauvignon 2017, Cabernet Franc 2017, and an icewine made from Corvina, the Valpolicella grape, which we have not seen anywhere else. Red icewine is genuinely difficult, because skins in extended contact with concentrated must turn bitter easily.

Big Head on Line 6 is Andrzej Lipinski’s label, and he is the winemaker most responsible for appassimento taking hold in Ontario. The list has two Chenin Blancs on it, which in Niagara is close to unheard of, and both sparkling wines are traditional method.

Between The Lines was the surprise. Small, family run, and you taste four metres from the tanks with the hose reel in shot. Their tote bags are printed with the winery’s own coordinates, 43.19 north and 79.10 west, which is a nice piece of branding and also, as it turns out, exactly where the camera recorded us standing.

Bella Terra at Virgil is a shed with trestle benches and a banner, out in the farmland rather than on the tourist road. Château des Charmes at St. Davids is the opposite: a checkerboard floor, a chandelier, and windows to the ceiling. Paul Bosc founded it in 1978 insisting on vinifera only, at a time when most of Ontario was still planting hybrids, and a natural mutation of Gamay Noir found in his vineyard became Gamay Droit, one of very few grape clones to originate in Canada.

Jackson-Triggs closed the trip at sunset, which the vineyard walk there is built for.

What is worth knowing before you go

Book a driver, not a taxi. Day two covered Beamsville, Vineland, Lincoln and Jordan, which is about fifty kilometres of back roads with a tasting at each end. Local designated-driver services exist and are the correct answer.

Winter is the better visit. Every tasting room on this trip had time to talk. In August none of them would have. The trade-off is that some estates cut their winter hours, so ring ahead rather than turning up.

Bench and plain are genuinely different. If you only have one day, and you want to understand why Ontario is a wine region rather than an icewine factory, spend it on the escarpment. If you want the icewine, stay in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Trying to do both in a day means driving past everything.

Red icewine is the thing to look for. Vidal is the workhorse and Riesling is the connoisseur’s choice, but Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Corvina taken to icewine are much rarer and much harder to make. Pillitteri had all three open.

Scores and full tasting notes for these wines are still to come.