WESTERN SKIES - April 16, 2005

*** ICE WINE ***

WHITNEY: Ask somebody to find a product from Colorado at their local liquor store, and chances are they'll head for the beer aisle. But our state is also home to more than fifty wineries. KUNC's Nancy Greenlese recently visited one on the Western Slope that's carving out a niche by making ice wine.

NANCY GREENLESE: Along Colorado's Western Slope, wisps of clouds decorate an almost cartoon blue sky. The winter sun dances on gnarled grape vines. This is Palisade, elevation forty-nine hundred feet. Jenne Baldwin shows off vines that make her fine wines.

JENNE BALDWIN: This is all Riesling down here. As it goes up the incline towards the canal, it's Syrah.

GREEENLESE: The youthful thirty-four year-old winemaker for Colorado's oldest vintner, Plum Creek winery, picks at some stark vines. They're stripped clean of the Riesling grapes that are the essence of her award-winning ice wine.

BALDWIN Here, you can tell this is where they had chopped it a couple years before.

GREENLESE : Making a true ice wine requires help from Mother Nature - and divine intervention doesn't hurt. German monks accidentally invented this dessert wine in the late eighteenth century when an early cold weather snap froze their grapes before harvest. They made do, pressing the grapes and discovering that freezing produced a highly concentrated, sugary juice that becomes what the Germans call ice-vine.

But, Palisade's weather is surprisingly moderate. The grapes usually shrivel or fall off before the late freeze. So Baldwin sticks the late harvest grapes in a freezer -- without guilt.

BALDWIN: People aren't hiding it as much (laughs). You're really just taking the process off the vine and you're just doing it more man made. There's not the romance or the mystery of it actually freezing on the vine.

GREENLESE: Grande River vineyards and other Colorado wineries skip making ice wine because they won't put their grapes in a freezer but Baldwin doesn't think she's cheating. She says her senses are the primary machinery used.

BALDWIN: It's still the art of winemaking. You have to go out there to the vineyards and look at the grapes growing and taste the grapes and see how they are ripening through the process. As technological as it goes, you still have to use your nose and your taste bud to see how it is.

GREENLESE: The process is pretty perilous. Before the freeze arrives, fungus can threaten the grapes. Also, delaying the harvest puts strain on the vines which could harm future crops. Andy Divine, who teaches wine appreciation at the University of Denver, says creating this sweet treat is always risky.

ANDY DIVINE: But if we can get a similar, not the same, but a similar product through using technology, why not?

GREENLESE: Divine is cool with the idea of using freezers. He says it will make the wine more affordable and accessible to Coloradans and, maybe, earn the scorn of purists.

DIVINE: They will say, "That is not ice wine. My God, how can you do that?" Well, we do that with a lot of things in our life.

GREENLESE: Back at Plum Creek, inside its cellar, the wine awaits its time. Juice from the pressed grapes sit in a stainless steel tank. Ice encrusts it, the temperature gauge reads thirty-five degrees. Baldwin pours some of the yellow liquid that looks like hazy sunshine--and gives it a whiff.

BALDWIN: Mostly in the nose I get a little bit of apple but it's mostly a spiced pear quality to me. You know, you want that nose that somebody can stick their nose in there and really smell that.

GREENLESE: Baldwin, a trained chemist, will next eliminate the proteins floating in the wine. Soon she'll gather up the cellar crew to bottle her liquid gold. It's a calculated risk for her winery but one that's afforded to Colorado as the new kids on the block.

BALDWIN: You have a little more play with what you can do. But in the same respect, you have to work twice as hard to get people interested because we're not Bordeaux, we're not California. We're Colorado.

GREENLESE: Advanced orders are pouring into the winery for Baldwin's limited quantity dessert wine. The lucky few will experience the new taste of Colorado.

For Western Skies, I'm Nancy Greenlese reporting.