Icy pickings

Susan Smith plucks frozen grapes from the vine -- then makes a beeline for the outdoor bar -- as part of Niagara's 10-day Icewine Festival

FESTIVALS AND EVENTS

The 11th annual Niagara Icewine Festival (http://www.grapeandwine.com; 905-688-0212) wraps up tomorrow, and is offering a variety of packages this weekend. These include:

Winter Garden: Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. Niagara-on-the-Lake's Queen Street will be closed to traffic so pedestrians can visit the ice bar and sample the wares of more than 20 wineries. Ice-carving demonstrations and carriage rides are also on tap. Admission is free.

Weekend Experience: From Friday to Sunday, various hotels, restaurants and wineries will host tastings ($75), seminars ($80) and winemakers' dinners ($175).

Icewine grapes are now protected with nets after the winery lost an entire early crop to hungry birds.

Icewine grapes used to be harvested strictly by hand, but Inniskillin's business has grown to the point that it now uses harvesting machines. As the machines come down the rows, they pull the frozen grapes through the holes in the protective netting.

Some picking is still done by hand, but most of it is for charitable fundraising and other special events. Most small wineries hire crews of pickers to harvest their grapes.

Icewine grapes are pressed in a basket press immediately after being picked to squeeze out the juice. Because the juice is separated from the frozen water inside the grape, it is highly concentrated. A frozen grape produces only about 10 per cent of the juice that a grape picked before freezing would produce.