The ice harvest is the most demanding harvest type which only some wine growers can afford, ice wine being the most significant predicate wine, and as such a pride of wineries. In Slavonia and Baranja it was only in the end of the year the weather conditions were favourable for this kind of harvest, requiring the grapes to be dehydrated and frozen, which guarantees icy extraction. The lowest sugar content in ice harvest must, prescribed by law, must be 127 Oechsle. Oechsle is a measurement unit for the weight of must, meaning the sugar content in grapes, Glas Slavonije published on January 4, 2017.
The chance for the last ice harvest was taken by the Erdut Vineyards company. They began collecting frozen grapes on the morning of the day before Christmas. In early dawn, when the temperature was the sought -7 Celsius, on their plantation on the southern slope of Erdut mountain, all employees together with the vineyard manager Mladen Alpez began harvesting, joined by chief enologist Melita Rumbak, Dunja Vukmirović and Pero Grgić from the management and Supervisory Board President Josip Pavić. With such events, there is no time to be lost, everyone joins as it is important to harvest them in as little time as possible.
Melita Rumbak spoke of the technical details. The grapes was harvested on a surface of half a hectare, Graševina variety, this being the first ice harvest since 2012.
“Back then we harvested Traminer and that ice harvest gathered many gold medals,” Rumbak boasted. But how much wine will they make now?
“This is hard to predict at this moment. Considering in the last ice harvest we harvested Traminer from five hectares and made 3.000 litres of wine, looking at the current surface it is realistic to expect between 300 and 400 litres of wine,” Rumbak predicted. It is certain this wine as a final product will be on the market in 2018.
Some time before then the market will see wine from the late harvest of dried grapes of Cabernet Sauvignon made in the Erdut vineyards some weeks before the ice harvest.
“The ice harvest is the top of them all, precisely because it doesn’t happen every year. It takes courage, the risks are great, diseases likely, the lack of low temperatures prevents it from being named an ice harvest. The yield is at the same time ten times lower than a regular harvest. Such wines are usually the pride of the winery and win new valuable medals, but are also the mark of superior winemakers,” concluded Pero Grgić, the director of Erdut Vineyards.
