Oh, hi there! Did I say next Sunday? I meant Wednesday, some week later, obviously.

So, where was I? Something about wine… Well, I assume you all know that wine is made of grapes. And there’s about a zillion different varieties, so there’s about a zillion different wines. Which really doesn’t make it easy to write any kind of introduction to the subject! If you’re really interested in all the basics of wine making, the varieties of grapes, and all the wine-producing countries of the world (and how you can become a bona fide wine-snob!), I can heartily recommend the Wine for Dummies book by Ed Mccarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan: it’s clear, well written and lays it all down in short segments, with, most importantly, a sense of humor. It’s all too easy to get so serious about wine that you forget it’s essentially a bunch of fermented grapes in a bottle.

I’m mostly a fan of white wines, although I’m trying to expand my palate by drinking more red wines. Reds are usually more complex than whites, and I tend to drink them far slower (instead of pouring the whole bottle in my gaping maw, like I do with most white wines).

But this week I’d like to feature a special wine I had never tasted before in my life: the Eiswein (Or Ice wine, as it’s called in English-speaking countries). It’s a white dessert wine,  made with very ripe grapes (usually Riesling) which were frozen by temperatures around -7 degrees Celcius. If the temperatures are higher than that, the grapes will rot and no Eiswein can be made. When the grapes freeze, some of the water will freeze out, but the sugars and other solids will remain in the juice. Because of the strict criteria the production of this wine has to meet, it’s a relatively rare and expensive wine. It’s mostly produced in Germany and Canada but other wine-producing countries such as the US and France have a go at it as well.

The difference between Eiswein and other sweet dessert wines such as Sauternes and Muscat is that this wine is more crisp and has a lot of acidic tones as well. It goes very well with ice cream or pastry desserts, such as the plum pie with custard I made last Sunday to accompany this wine (I’ll give the recipe later, when I’ve taken some pictures). Even people who profess to hate sweet wines, such as my mother, really like this wine.

So, this was my first real wine installment. I’ll try to give some more specifics about wine production next time, and explain some terms wine-snobs can use to confuse you with, such as body, chaptalization, noble rot, bouquet and nose!