First Ever Ice Wine in Brazil

More anecdotal evidence of a cooling world?   Via Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP   Team Vinicola Perico, Vinicola Vineyards in Santa Catarina, Brazil   Our friends at the METSUL reports that for the first time ever in Brazil icewine has been produced in this unusually cold June in Southern Brazil. This is a release on the Vinicolo Vineyard website. The following is a rough web based translation from Portuguese to English. The original Portuguese story is here.   With pleasure we inform that the Perico team yesterday registered in its vineyards, located in the farm Boy God, District of the Perico in Joaquin – Santa Catarina, a phenomenon of the nature, the most waited of this time: the ice wine. The temperatures had fallen well below-freezing and the thermometers had marked – 7.5 C. A dream if became reality: the harvest of the grapes congealed for this so wonderful act of the nature.     With this, the Vinicola Perico, will be first ever vineyard in Brazil to produce ICEWINE (Wine of the Ice), a natural licoroso wine, with raised amount of residual sugar of the proper grape.     The process of production of the Icewine, consists of mature grapes and extreme cold at-6 C, in this condition, the water that if find in the interior of the berries of the grapes congeal and the ice separates the rich juice in sugar. When the grapes are just right, they’re carefully picked by hand. Grapes in this condition have a very low yield – often an entire vine only makes a single bottle. That’s why ice wine can be so expensive and is often sold in half-bottles only … but it’s worth it! After this long harvest process, the grapes go through weeks of fermentation, followed by a few months of barrel aging in new barrels of French oak, Allier forest. The wine ends up a golden color, or a deep, rich amber. It has a very sweet (of course) taste. After vinificado we will have the pleasure to present this great BRAZILIAN only ICEWINE, which happens in Austria, Germany, north of Italy and Canada. See photos of our vineyard to the dawn, before and after the sun rose. More photos on home page.   We have posted stories on how this cold spring has caused agricultural problems in many locations worldwide. See this post . See David Archibald’s post originally on Icecap in which he forecasted these agricultural issues reposted with comments on Watts Up With That here. See Bloomberg post on spring wheat concerns in Canada due to a very cold May. See more on Spring in Canada here   Despite all these anecdotal evidences of global cooling, NOAA announced May 2009 was the 4th warmest in 130 years of record keeping (and manipulation) with an anomaly of +0.53C just a week after the University of Alabama using the NASA MSU satellite data assessed the global anomaly at just +0.043C, making it the 15th coldest in 31 years. Anthony and I will surely have more to say on this unlikely divergence soon.   Watts Up With That?

Posted via email from Garth's posterous