Best wine I've tasted lately -- ice wine

      Ice wine is always expensive because it’s made of frozen grapes, picked by hand in the middle of a freezing night. How much would you want per hour to do that? So $75 per half-bottle is a fair price to pay for the 2006 Eroica White Riesling Ice Wine by Chateau St. Michelle. Its grapes were picked on Oct. 31, 2006 – on a night when the temperature never rose above 14 degrees.

     They hurry the grapes to the press, then, before they can thaw. They press them harder than usual, since they’re frozen, but, with the water trapped in ice, they get only a few drops of juice, super-concentrated with sugar and acid. Even that hard pressing yields less than half the usual volume.

       Chateau Ste. Michelle since 1999 has teamed up with the German winemaker Ernst Loosen to produce top Riesling wines including Erioca. And while the winery is just outside Seattle, the grapes come from Horse Heaven Vineyard in eastern Washington State, just above the Columbia River.

       The resulting wine is low in alcohol, just 7.5 percent. It’s flavor is honeyed, not super-sweet, nicely balanced with acid to keep it from cloying. It has flavors of white peaches and cinnamon.

       It’s a great dessert wine with fruit tarts, crème brûlée, rum-raisin ice cream. Even better, after that perfect meal, I like to sip this not with dessert but as it.

       One point of trivia. While “eroica” looks like it should mean “erotic,” it actually means “heroic.”

       You probably could win a bet about that in a really high-class bar.