Canadian Icewine

Icewine with rhubarb cake

Recently, while shopping, I came across the offer of fresh rhubarb. With rhubarb, I’m always a bit torn because on the one hand it tastes great and you can make great desserts and desserts out of it, but on the other hand it is relatively labor-intensive. These countless fibers are a bit annoying when peeling. But rhubarb – similar to asparagus or strawberries – is simply part of spring, so I have to make a rhubarb dish at least once a year. So I couldn’t resist and put it in the shopping basket.
Of course, the whole thing gets even better with the matching wine. That’s why two questions arose at home: Which recipe do I make with rhubarb? And: Which dessert wine goes well with rhubarb?

Rhubarb cake

Said and done. At home, I searched for rhubarb recipes in various baking and cooking books. I found what I was looking for in an ancient part called “Sweet Cuisine” with a fat, red sticker “Special price DM 13.80” on the front. This, in combination with the charming 70s design of this dessert cookbook, conjured up a big grin on my face. No idea where I actually got this ham from, probably from my grandma’s fund. But I found in it a very interesting sounding rhubarb cake recipe with meringue.

With this recipe you have to process 100 g butter, 1 packet of vanilla sugar, 100 g sugar, 3 egg yolks, 50 g cornstarch, 150 g flour, 1 1/2 coated tsp baking powder and 6 tbsp milk into a dough, fill into a springform pan and bake at about 180 ° C for about half an hour. Meanwhile, the coating is made. To do this, beat 3 egg whites stiffly and gradually let 150 g of sugar and 50 g of ground almonds trickle in. Finally, mix this with 375 g of cleaned rhubarb (which is best prepared in advance so as not to run out of time).
This topping comes on top of the half-baked dough and the whole thing is baked for another good half hour.

Very tasty!

Does ice wine go well with rhubarb cake? And in general: Does Icewine go well with rhubarb?

Of course, a nice dessert needs an appropriate companion. But which wine do you choose? This question is not as easy to answer with rhubarb as with many other desserts. Botanically, it is a vegetable whose stems are consumed, even if it is always used like a fruit in our kitchen. In addition, it is extremely acidic. If you were to reach for a dry wine here, then the acid sensation would be increased and the whole rhubarb dish would taste too sour overall. Therefore, you have to reach for a sweet dessert wine here. For rhubarb dishes, where the natural sourness is still in the foreground, I would recommend a Riesling based sweet wine. Because the Riesling itself is a grape variety with very high acidity. This, in combination with the residual sweetness of an ice wine or icewine, conjures up a wonderful sweetness and acidity game, which can harmonize with rhubarb at its finest.

My Cellardoor24 recommendation for sour rhubarb dishes, such as .B a rhubarb sorbet is a wine from Canada, namely the
Pillitteri Estates Carretto Riesling Icewine 2016 from the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario, Canada.

After this little general digression, we come back to our rhubarb baiser cake. In this recipe, some sugar has been processed. As a result, the natural sourness of rhubarb is very strongly covered by the sweetness. Overall, the cake tastes sweet and hardly sour. Therefore, I recommend a wine, which of course may also be very lush sweet, but also have a bit less acidity than a Riesling.

Vidal is a rather unknown grape variety in this country: It is a so-called hybrid grape variety, which is native to North America. There, i.e. in Canada and parts of the USA, hybrid grape varieties are often cultivated and highly valued by local winegrowers for their frost resistance. In winters, when temperatures often drop below -20°C, you are understandably very grateful for vines that you don’t have to worry about if they survive the extreme frost.

The choice fell again on a Canadian wine, namely on the Lakeview Vidal Icewine, which also comes from the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario, Canada.

The Vidal is very suitable for the preparation of Icewine (ice wine). This is due to the fact that it is not particularly susceptible to rot, which can often bring a humid autumn and therefore the chance that the berries will survive the autumn on the vine healthy and fresh is very high. In addition, it has an aroma that is well suited for ice wines. The acidity is sufficient to make a sweet wine look fresh, but not quite as high as Riesling. This is quite suitable for acid-sensitive wine lovers.

How is Canadian Icewine made?

Now all the time there was talk of Icewine from Canada. For many a reader, the question has certainly arisen, what exactly this Icewine is and what distinguishes it from other wines.
Most people know for sure that Icewine, which is called ice wine in German, is a very sweet dessert wine. Some may also know that it is a very rare and precious wine. Why is that? How does the ice wine become so sweet? And why is it more expensive than most dry wines?
Surely it will become clear to everyone at the latest now that you do not simply add sugar to a dry wine. Because so you would not get such a noble, special drink, but a not excessively high-quality and only cardboard-sweet wine, from which you would get a headache in the worst case.

With Icewine or ice wine, the high sugar concentration is achieved by letting the grapes hang on the vine until winter. As a result, they mature rather than if you read them already in late summer or autumn. The grapes may only be harvested when it has at least -8°C in Canada (-7°C in Europe). They must therefore not exceed this temperature when pressing after harvesting, otherwise the wine may not be called Icewine or Eiswein. Through this process, in which the grapes are completely frozen, you get an extremely high concentration of sugar and aromas and at the same time only get a fraction of the juice that can be squeezed out of the grapes during normal winemaking. Most of it remains crystallized in the grape. In addition, the whole thing is a real bone work: The harvest helpers usually have to cut the grapes from the vines in the middle of the night in freezing cold. This is anything but cozy.
At least now it becomes clear why the Icewine/Eiswein is so precious: On the one hand, it is like a lottery game whether the grapes last so long healthy on the vine, since the necessary temperatures for the harvest are often only reached in January. Often they are not reached at all, then all the effort was in vain. On the other hand, when it comes to harvesting, the amount of must that the winemaker gets is very small.
That’s why you can really speak of liquid gold in the Icewine/Eiswein.

Why is Icewine made in Canada?

The history of quality viticulture in Canada is still relatively young. Nevertheless, Canada is now the world’s largest Icewine producer. This is mainly due to the favorable climate for production. While in Germany, for example, it is always uncertain whether the corresponding minus temperatures will really be reached in winter, Canadians in Ontario can assume with a very high probability that the necessary frosty temperatures will be reached due to the extremely continental climate. The region is therefore absolutely predestined for Icewine production. Of course, this speaks very much in favor of betting on this horse “Icewine” in Canada.

I wish you a lot of fun with the processing of rhubarb and especially with the discovery of the Canadian Icewines! By the way, Cellardoor24 also offers excellent dry wines from Canada.

Your Daniela Dünckelmeyer