Is the ice-style wine recommended with dessert or for dessert? If sweet enough, maybe the latter?
Ice wine is produced from grapes frozen on the vine. Anything else is just uncivilized.
“For those who can appreciate a truly sweet dessert wine, this rare ICE-style wine is just for you. We recommend this delicacy with your favorite dessert.”
Read that. I’m questioning the recommendation. 
Well, of course it doesn’t delve into the eventuality that dessert wine IS your favorite dessert, in which case you may enter an infinite loop and fry your internal processor.
Luckily there is only one processor core tasked with that thread so there is at least one more to go.
I enjoy ice and dessert wines, and the Zin sounds interesting. Kind of a quirky little WW offering. In for 2 with fingers crossed…
Hrm . . . I love ice wine and late harvest Zin. This might be too hard to pass up. Woot is making my money saving for that trip to Tokyo difficult! The '08 Zin is selling for $28 on the website and the '09 Ice style is $34. That is a total of $62 plus shipping (for my zip at $24) so this looks to be a good deal!
I guess Ice wine would be frozen by the climate rather than mechanically. As freezing temps generally occur later in the season perhaps the hang time on ice wines are greater than the hang times on ice style wines. Of course these are usually from more northern areas so the grapes barely ripen anyway.
Well done!
WD, see what you and Scott did? One day she’s drinking in the basement and the next it’s first sucker. I think that 1982 TBA may have tipped her over the edge 
(That stuff was phenomenal…among my top 5 bottles ever.)
In regions that actually produce icewine, you’re not allowed to call it that unless the grapes freeze naturally on the vine. In the case of Niagara (VQA rules) you also must meet a strict requirement of brix at pressing to qualify as icewine. If you just barely miss it, you may still qualify for Special Select Late Harvest status, which fetches a lot less $ than icewine, but is still fabulous.
The wines I’ve had that were frozen after pressing don’t tend to start off as interesting and complex as icewine. However, I got to have some 2003 Angel Ice at Scott’s yesterday and that was excellent. So I remain open to the “ice wine style” when it’s done right.
Oh, forgot to do this last night …
Blah, blah, blah, create yada, yada, yada gathering now. You know the drill.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I’m still not sure if I want to spend this much for 2 half bottles, even though the price is in line for ice wine.
Haven’t been paying much attention to wine.woot lately, mainly beacuse it’s so cold out for shipping wine, but happened to new wine on Mon Wed and Fri? I was thinking I could wake up and purchase the Wellington 12 pack today.
How does pH and TA matter with dessert wines? If it’s important, can we get the pH and TA on the Gewürztraminer too?
around the time amazon bought woot, they started offering something different each day mon-fri and they also did away with wine.woot.com/monday.
Why are dessert wines so expensive? I can understand a price premium on vintage port that has had to be stored, but for such young wines, what justifies the higher price? Are dessert wines more expensive to produce?
Yes. Dessert wines are as concentrated and sweet as they are because they made from grapes which have been partially dehydrated. The method of dehydration varies - in this case, by letting the grapes hang on the vine longer (the Zin) or freezing the grapes (the Gewurz). As a result, though, it takes more grapes to make a bottle of dessert wine, not to mention that a grower typically loses more grapes to mildew and rot (of an ignoble sort) when growing for dessert wine and winemakers are generally more selective about the bunches that they crush when making a dessert wine. Hence, all told, the grape-growing costs for the juice in each bottle are much, much higher than for regular wine.
Harvest Moon Winery produces around 3500 cases per year. The 09 dessert gewürztraminer production was 272 cases per the website. Late harvest zim doesn’t specify. Both of these specialty wines is amazing and worth you consideration if you enjoy dessert wines. No porty- style in this lineup - pure nectar with striking varietal characteristics.