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WINE

Vintners harvest bumper ice wine crop

Fans of ice wine can rejoice over a bumper crop of the German specialty after this weekend’s deep freeze, according to the nation’s vintners.

Vintners harvest bumper ice wine crop
Photo: DPA

Known as Eiswein in German, the high-quality dessert wine requires grapes to freeze on the vine.

Perfect conditions this year convinced vineyards to take a gamble on ice wine by leaving more grapes than usual hanging on the vine, Ernst Büscher from the German Wine Institute in Mainz said this week.

“That’s perfect, because it ensures acidity levels are well concentrated,” he said, explaining this should lead to a crisp vintage without sickly sweetness.

Ice wine requires the grapes to freeze at temperatures below -7 degrees Celsius before being harvested and processed. The cold makes a particularly sweet beverage.

Using the so-called Oechsle scale to determine the density of grape must, German vintners recorded levels from 150 to 200 degrees. The higher the rating, the riper and more sugar content must has.

Whereas the Korrell vineyard along the Nahe River harvested an ice wine with 190 degrees Oechsle, the vineyard Balthasar Ress in the Rhinegau region brought in a Riesling ice wine reaching 170 degrees.

Büscher said the ice wine harvest could continue well into this week, with meteorologists forecasting double-digit minus temperatures for much of Germany.

DAPD/The Local/mry

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FARMING

Cold snap ‘could slash French wine harvest by 30 percent’

A rare cold snap that froze vineyards across much of France this month could see harvest yields drop by around a third this year, France's national agriculture observatory said on Thursday.

Cold snap 'could slash French wine harvest by 30 percent'
A winemaker checks whether there is life in the buds of his vineyard in Le Landreau, near Nantes in western France, on April 12th, following several nights of frost. Photo: Sebastien SALOM-GOMIS / AFP

Winemakers were forced to light fires and candles among their vines as nighttime temperatures plunged after weeks of unseasonably warm weather that had spurred early budding.

Scores of vulnerable fruit and vegetable orchards were also hit in what Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie called “probably the greatest agricultural catastrophe of the beginning of the 21st century.”

IN PICTURES: French vineyards ablaze in bid to ward off frosts

The government has promised more than €1 billion in aid for destroyed grapes and other crops.

Based on reported losses so far, the damage could result in up to 15 million fewer hectolitres of wine, a drop of 28 to 30 percent from the average yields over the past five years, the FranceAgriMer agency said.

That would represent €1.5 to €2 billion of lost revenue for the sector, Ygor Gibelind, head of the agency’s wine division, said by videoconference.

It would also roughly coincide with the tally from France’s FNSEA agriculture union.

Prime Minister Jean Castex vowed during a visit to damaged fields in southern France last Saturday that the emergency aid would be made available in the coming days to help farmers cope with the “exceptional situation.”

READ ALSO: ‘We’ve lost at least 70,000 bottles’ – French winemakers count the cost of late frosts

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