Celebrating icewine

Dinner came in luscious waves – first a delicate spoonful of icewine-infused smoked salmon, then a scallop ravioli covered gently with champagne cream sauce, then strips of roast pork marinated in Tahitian vanilla, garlic and sage. Then, finally, the most amazing ice cream, made with sour cream and fig-wine sauce. All of this paired with the best wines interior British Columbia has to offer. And every mouthwatering bite, every tongue-tantalizing drop, was absolutely guilt-free.

For we had spent half that day up to our knees in fresh powder snow, skiing our legs into rubbery submission on the slopes of Sun Peaks Resort in British Columbia. All those yummy calories … poof, gone.

That’s the wonderful thing about holding an icewine festival at a ski resort. You can eat, drink and be very, very merry without an ounce of remorse.

A wine festival in mid-January? With all that snow?

Well, yes. When better to celebrate a wine made out of frozen grapes?

You’ve probably heard of icewine – vaguely. But the truth is, though the concept of icewine is centuries old, the popularity of it is pretty new. We’re talking less than two decades, which in wine epochs is like the snap of a finger.

Icewine is a dessert wine, but its beauty is in its light taste. Yes, it is sweet, but not cloying. It’s not syrupy, as so many alcoholic dessert drinks can be.

And yes, it’s expensive. But there’s a reason.

We arrived at Sun Peaks last January as wine neophytes. We knew wine festivals can be somewhat snobbish affairs, with folks decanting this and slurping that and talking in an utterly foreign language where nose has nothing to do with your face.

“That’s OK,” said Sandra Oldfield of Tinhorn Creek Vineyards in Oliver, B.C., who was talking about how icewine can be made from lots of grapes besides the usual Rieslings. “I’m going to assume some of you are totally new to a wine festival.”

She then launched into a bit of history. Stories say that icewine was accidentally discovered in Germany in 1794 by a farmer trying to save his grape harvest after a sudden frost. But it wasn’t made commercially in Europe until the 1960s, and it stayed below the radar in North America.

Then, in the 1980s, vineyards in both Ontario’s Niagara region and British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley realized they had the perfect conditions for icewine. You need good wine grapes, of course, but you also need frost at just the right time.

What makes the stuff so expensive is the risk factor plus the labor.

A vineyard has to set aside part of its crop and not pick it during the usual harvest. These grapes sit, waiting for the thermometer to dip below 15 degrees so they look like little glass marbles. If that doesn’t happen before the grapes rot, or if the temperature rises during the harvest, the whole crop is lost.

If the frost comes on time, the frozen grapes are hand-picked and pressed immediately. The frozen water gets left behind, and what comes out of the press is a tiny drop of liquid, saturated with sugar.

“The first time we did this,” said Oldfield, “we waited and waited and waited. Finally, there was this one little drop of juice … and it froze halfway through the line.

“And when we were finally done, it was like, ‘Huh? Did we do anything? The grapes look the same!’ “

That’s because it’s like sucking the juice out of a popsicle. It takes about seven pounds of grapes to make one 375-milliliter (13-ounce) bottle of icewine. That same amount of grapes would produce more than a quart of table wine.

The end result is a gold-colored wine that is sweet yet light. And not cheap; that 375-milliliter bottle goes for $50 to $120.

“The important thing to remember,” Oldfield continued, “is sweetness depends on temperature – period. Whites aren’t sweeter than reds. The lower the temperature, the more water is left behind.”

The next morning, for us, it was back to skiing. We were supposed to have breakfast with Nancy Greene, 1968 Canadian Olympic gold medalist and Sun Peaks’ director of skiing. But the night before, Sun Peaks’ regular little miracle took place.

We’ve skied around the world and honestly, this happens no place else with that kind of predictability: The groomers go out around midnight and smooth the runs until they look like billiard table tops. Then it starts to snow. By dawn, six to eight inches of dry, fluffy snow sits atop the groomed runs, turning them into runways where you can bounce powder turns like a pro.

We’ve been on $5,000 heli-ski trips where folks did runs down glaciers. Sun Peaks the morning after fresh snow is just like that.

We stuck our heads into Macker’s restaurant at Greene’s Cahilty Lodge.

“You do understand we’re not having breakfast,” we said.

“Go, go, GO,” she waved towards the lifts with a knowing grin. “There are NO friends on a powder day.”

That afternoon, we did two more seminars and Yvette learned how to drink red wine. Finally.

The table at the first seminar held a dish with tiny piles of salt and sugar along with a lemon wedge.

“Taste the wine. Then taste the salt and sip the wine again,” said Hester Creek winemaker Eric Von Krosigk. “Then do the sugar and the lemon.”

The salt made red wine taste almost sweet. The sugar made the tannin shrivel our tongues. The lemon turned it almost into a dessert wine.

“What you pair wine with makes all the difference,” said Delta Sun Peaks chef Ian Riddick, who explained he wanted us to play with tastes.

And we learned a couple of secrets.

“Cheese is one of the equalizers for really bad, old-style Italian reds,” Von Krosigk said. It’s the fat; it binds up tannins that might otherwise concave your palate.

Proper pairing involves a lot of juggling of food in your mouth. The idea is to take a bite of food, then a sip of the wine at the same time. The two should combine for something better than each by itself.

A few tips: Eggs work well with Riesling. There’s nothing better than dunking biscotti in a nice icewine. Cheap reds and doughnuts work surprisingly well.

One of Riddick’s faves is icewine and waffles. And olives are a quick fix for too much tannin in a red.

The absolute no-nos? Too much garlic with any wine. Pasta and sweet whites. Big reds and sushi.

“Just remember to match the intensities,” Riddick said.

Then – sigh, a student’s work is never done – on to the next seminar: pairing chocolates and wine.

Here, we learned that cabernets work magic on just about any chocolate but seem to do better with sweeter stuff (think milk and white). And icewine really doesn’t go all that well with any chocolate.

“With a mouthful of ultra-sweet, why toss in extra sugar?” is the way one person put it.

Between all this, we managed to also taste the mountain. Sun Peaks, sitting in its own little valley 30 miles from Kamloops in British Columbia’s interior, is close enough to civilization (a one-hour flight from Seattle, shorter from Vancouver) to make it easy to reach but far enough from urban centers so that the slopes don’t turn into anthills on the weekends.

What was once a single chair serving seriously scary expert terrain has expanded to 3,700 skiable acres across three mountains with 117 runs and 12 lifts; 6,500 beds in hotels, condos and townhouses; 17 restaurants; and enough non-ski activities (ice skating, tubing, dog sledding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, sleigh rides, a full-service spa) to keep anyone happy.

The expert runs off the Burfield chair along with the runs down the front face of Mount Morrisey and off the side of the Crystal Chair take care of the adrenal teens. Dozens of long, well-groomed cruising runs all over the mountains keep the intermediates happy. And novice runs off the Sundance chair give nervous beginners their own space.

As for the village, it’s small and easily walked, with that upscale-rustic mix of peeled logs, rough stone and muted colors that has become an almost standard North American ski resort style. It’s comfy and low-key, and at night, twinkling lights turn it into a fairyland.

Then, for four days during the third week of January, all this turns into icewine central, with competitions, seminars and a blow-out winemaster’s dinner, plus the signature event: Saturday night’s progressive tasting.

Promptly at 6 p.m., we picked up our wine glasses at the Delta hotel’s ballroom, hung the complimentary blinking lights around our necks and waded into the fray.

It was sips of Cabernets, swigs of Rieslings, slurps of Pinot Gris and a drop here and there of icewine. Twenty wineries, eight venues, scattered throughout the village. So much sniffing, swirling, slurping and, yes, swallowing – so little time.

What started eight years ago with a single night of festivities and 109 guests has grown into four full days and 1,000 people. Some 700 of them had tickets to the progressive tasting that night and our happy, tipsy group wound its way from hotel to hotel in earnest search of the magic flavor. Around us, streetlights twinkled against thick layers of snow on trees and roofs in a scene straight out of Currier and Ives.

Yes, we probably slurped one or three too many. But the cold air soothed us and the walk through the snow-covered trees under a spectacularly starry sky refreshed us.

And the next morning, six inches of untouched snow sat atop the groomed runs. Just waiting.