Make room on your rack between those after-work whites and dinner reds for something truly indulgent: ice wine. It’s the ultrarich and supersweet dessert wine that makes for the perfect post-meal treat, and for Michigan vintners willing to take the gamble, it’s the best part of winter.
Instead of picking grapes when they’re at their peak in, say, late summer or early fall, viticulturists leave them on the vine into the winter months. They’re only harvested when (and if) temperatures drop to around 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice wine grapes are basically an extreme version of late-harvest grapes, which, as the name implies, are picked after the regular harvest season is over so they have time to get extra sweet. The difference? Ice wine grapes actually need to freeze.
“We want the whole clusters to freeze on the vine, and then we harvest them when they’re frozen,” explains Brian Hosmer, the head winemaker at Chateau Chantal on the Old Mission Peninsula. “We have a very short window. We have to get them into the press while they’re still frozen.” What winemakers manage to squeeze out of the frozen grapes is a very concentrated juice with lots of sugar and consequently high alcohol potential.
The team at Chateau Chantal aims to produce ice wine every year, assuming temperatures drop low enough for long enough, but it’s a risky endeavor. Crews have to contend with harsh conditions and sometimes snow, and even before the harvest window opens, there’s a risk of losing grapes to pests, inclement weather, or disease when they’re left on the vine for so long.
The Chateau Chantal crew got lucky this year, harvesting the coveted frozen grapes on a sunny, bitterly cold day in January. Hosmer notes that the winery might produce 50,000 gallons of standard wine each year compared with a couple hundred gallons of ice wine — if that.
Cody Kresta Vineyard & Winery in Mattawan produces and sells ice wine, too, but the team buys the unfermented juice from another grower. “We had a heck of a time with the fermentation,” says owner David Butkovich. “It can be a problem child. Ice wine is not easy.” And that’s because of the high sugar content. A typical harvest might yield a juice at 20 to 25 degrees Brix, which is the measure of sugar in grape juice or fermenting wine. Juice for ice wine can range from 32 to 46 degrees Brix, which means introducing the proper yeasts that can activate the process and live in that environment can be tricky. Then, of course, you want a balanced wine in the end, around 10% alcohol, Butkovich notes.
If you can get it right, though, you’re left with a sweet, viscous product with rich notes of burnt honey, toasted caramel, apricot, and/or baked apple. “It’s a novelty, really,” Butkovich says. “You have it for dessert with chocolate or something like that.” Hosmer says to take your time sipping it: “The flavor changes as you’re tasting it. It morphs and more things come out.”
All things considered, the price of a bottle of ice wine is typically heftier than your average vino’s, and you’ll often find the liquid gold in half-sized bottles. At Chateau Chantal, the Estate and Cabernet Franc ice wines go for $90, and the Vidal ice wine sells for $45; Cody Kresta’s Vidal Blanc ice wine also sells for $45. Both wineries offer affordable tastings to give curious folk an opportunity to try ice wine.
To help lower both the risk for wineries and, in turn, the price for consumers, some wineries may opt for more controlled methods of producing imitation ice wine. “Cryoextraction, that’s the really fun term for it, which really just means putting [grapes] into a freezer,” Hosmer says. Still, he says of the authentic stuff, “When you leave the fruit on the vine, the heating and cooling of the fruit kind of changes the flavor. It oxidizes the fruit a little bit. It does something special.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the 2025 Michigan Wine Country magazine.
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