2009 Minus Five
Oregon Riesling Dessert Wine
Lone Star Vineyard
Eola-Amity Hills AVA, Willamette Valley, Oregon
375ml bottles
2009 Minus Five Tasting Notes
This wine is a cacophony of scents and flavors - from peaches to jasmine to hints of dried pine shavings. There is a defined sweetness to the wine (this is a dessert wine after all!), but there is also a streak of acidity there beautifully balancing that sweetness and keeping the finish from becoming cloying. This re-creation of the classic Canadian/German style Ice wine shows purity and complexity while showing yet another expression of the amazing Riesling grape.
Winemaker's Production Notes
In October 2009, ripe whole clusters of Riesling were flash frozen in a local frozen-raspberry warehouse at Minus Five degrees (-5º F), what we refer to as “Cryo-Cluster”. Then, we picked the coldest day of December to take the fruit out of the freezer and drop it into our grape press. The frozen clusters are pressed over two days. High sugar concentrated juice dribbled out of the press and was fermented with one of our proprietary yeast strains in a mix of stainless steel and previously-used French oak barrels.
Since we freeze the fruit in a freezer, we cannot call this wine “ice wine”, so after consulting the spirits of Ted Williams, Walt Disney and the X-Men, we invented the term Cryo-Cluster for this low-alcohol dessert wine.
