6 Ice Wines to Try Right Now

Ice wine is the perfect special occasion glass. Thanks to its syrupy full-bodied consistency and rich liquid-gold hue, the dessert wine is thought of as being deeply indulgent, despite being lower in alcohol than most wines, at around 10% ABV. 

Squeezing frozen grapes into small but sweet concentrations is a technique dating as far back as ancient Rome. Germany has called it a homegrown delicacy since the late 18th century, and in North America, the style seems to have caught on in the 1970s, sparked by a German in Canada’s Okanagan Valley.

Once a chance for farmers to save their crops after an unforeseen frost, making ice wine is a dying art. Fewer winemakers are leaving grapes on the vine after harvest, because these days that cold snap can no longer be counted on to come.

In Germany, now the world’s second-largest producer of ice wine after Canada, 2019’s warm winter left an unprecedented situation: All but one harvest failed. “Due to global warming, the chance of harvesting ice wine grapes at minus 7 degrees Celsius [about 19 degrees Fahrenheit] has drastically decreased over the past 10 years,” says Ernst Büscher, a spokesperson for the German Wine Institute.

According to Büscher, ice wines age beautifully and can be kept for decades. And if climate change continues its course, ice wines will become extremely rare or even unavailable if producers are no longer able to make them. It’s already known for being on the expensive side, and prices are rising. So perhaps now’s the time to squirrel away a bottle (or a half-bottle, as ice wines are commonly sold) before it’s too late.