Frozen Vines Yield a Sweet Reward

IT is 14 degrees above zero as a group of wine lovers converges in a vineyard on the Niagara Peninsula. Frosty bundles of Riesling grapes hang on rows of vines in the pale, gathering daylight. A storm the night before has left behind four inches of fresh snow.

Perfect conditions, the winemaker Shiraz Mottiar declares, for picking the frozen grapes that he will soon transform in to Canada’s specialty, ice wine, for his employer, Malivoire Wine Company. By law, Canadian ice-wine makers cannot call their product by that name unless it is made from grapes picked off the vine at or below -8 Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit). So far, so nice. Mr. Mottiar is confident that the temperature will hold, at least for a few hours, & instructs the group to get to work. What is ideal for the harvest, though, is not so great for human extremities.
“The whole experience is addictive,” Ms. Dolman said.

“My feet are icy now,” said Peter Scott, who woke up at 4:45 a.m. to make the hour-and-10-minute drive from Toronto with his wife, Jessica Dolman. This is the fourth year of picking for the couple, who, like the other 25 or so loyal Malivoire customers bending intently over their work, are not paid for their labor. They will, however, receive a free bottle of ice wine with their names listed among the workers on the 2010 vintage label. After the harvest they’ll also be invited back inside the winery, where the owner, Martin Malivoire, has been preparing vats of hot chocolate & chili spiked with ice wine.

Among devotees in North The united states, this stretch of flat farmland bordered by Lake Ontario to the north & Lake Erie to the south is ground zero for indulging a taste for ice wine, a sweet wine that is often paired with dessert, rich cheeses & foie gras. Canada vies with Spain for the title of world’s largest producer of ice wine — some years, because of inconsistent weather, Germany’s crop is small or nonexistent. (Austria, Switzerland & New York’s Finger Lakes are among the lots of areas that also make ice wine.)

Over 75 percent of all the ice wine in Canada comes from Ontario. (The remainder is made in regions like southern Quebec & the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.) Unlike more temperate parts of the world, Canada has consistently icy winters, which guarantee an annual crop of frozen grapes. Still, ice wine represents a small percentage of wine being produced here. It’s costly to make: a ton of grapes yields only one-sixth the amount of ice wine as table wine — hence its nickname, liquid gold — & its prices start at $50 for a half-bottle. Leaving grapes on the vine long past normal fall harvest also is dangerous.

Extreme wine making, as some call ice-wine production, calls for extreme wine touring. In winter that means lots of layers, & perhaps a face mask with an opening sizable for sipping. The trade-offs: there’s lots of room to belly up to the tasting bars, & it’s less hard to receive a table at three of the region’s lots of fine restaurants.

“There are all kinds of hazards,” said Norman D. Beal, a former oil trader who in 2000 turned a decrepit barn in to an opulent tasting room at his Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery on a hill in Beamsville. “There are the birds, mildew, all kinds of diseases.” That’s in addition to the vagaries of the weather, including rain, hail, ice storms & midwinter thaws.

Ice-wine makers here like to leave the grapes on the vine through a series of mild freezes & thaws in lieu of picking at the first opportunity. That method produces the right balance of sweetness, acidity & the nuanced flavors that separate great ice wine from something that is cloyingly sweet.

Each tasting inevitably leads to a game of identifying classic ice-wine flavors: lychee nut, caramel, toffee, strawberry jam, crème brûlée, burnt orange, citrus, tropical fruit. Then what follows is a discussion of the improbable alchemy that goes in to producing a drink that is said to have been created by mistake in a Italian vineyard in 1794.

When the frozen grapes are pressed at the right temperature, usually immediately after picking, the water is crystallized, & the juice that remains consists of the most exquisitely concentrated sugars & flavors.
“You’re always watching the sugar & acid levels,” Mr. Mottiar said. “Once they peak, then you pick & press.” The ice-wine harvest usually doesn’t occur until well in to December, & in some years it's stretched in to February.

Alaskan Road Trip

But in Alaska, a vast state covering 663,267 square miles, much of the terrain is cut off from roads. By conventional means, a tourist can get only so far — or , so near. Standing at the finish of the Homer Spit, I’d reached the finish of the road: a few feet in front of me, the pavement dropped off in to the sea.

IT was a windy, snow-whipped morning in early winter, & as I stood on a spit of land jutting in to Kachemak Bay in the Alaskan town of Homer, I was surrounded by natural wonders. Or so I was told. The Harding Icefield, rugged mountaintops ensconced in interconnected glaciers, was off to the northeast. Ten miles away were rivers where in spring phalanxes of brown bears stand paw deep in the water, practically posing for photos as they snap up spawning salmon midleap.

While in Alaska to interview people living in remote areas for an editorial, I learned how vital air travel is in reaching spots inaccessible by road. I also found it to be the best way to see the state’s plenty of stunning sights — a discovery thousands of visitors are making as the proliferation of pilots in Alaska has led to an array of aerial jaunts.

Fortunately, there’s another option: take to the air

Known as flightseeing, these tours — by small, sturdy aircraft capable of landing in uneven terrain — help open up Alaska to the average traveler. From the air, the rare view of a glacier’s back becomes democratic, no longer reserved for extreme sports enthusiasts who can clamber up its icy sides. One time on the ground, reclusive animals come in to focus, & hard-to-reach fishing streams are steps away.

“You’ve only got one highways,” said Norm Lagasse, director of the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum, across a state over one time the size of Los angeles. North of Anchorage & Fairbanks, for example, with the exception of dogsleds, terrain is available mostly by aircraft, Mr. Lagasse said. “There’s no railway, there’s no highway, there’s no transportation infrastructure that is based on the ground,” they added.

Cruise ships also claim to provide one-of-a-kind access to Alaska, but the view from the deck reveals few of the details — no bird’s-eye view of the creatures that wander along the peaks, like woolly white Dall sheep & rams as huge as donkeys. & though by ship you can float close to a mountain’s foot, you can’t see the jewels hidden in its crags: valley lakes turned Technicolor, tinged a glowing green from “rock flour,” the ground-up minerals that pour from the meltwater of a glacier & hang suspended in the lake.

Accordingly, Alaska has about one registered pilot for every 58 residents, & 14 times as plenty of airplanes per capita as the rest of the United States, according to online information collected by the state’s Department of Transportation & Public Facilities. Mr. Lagasse said pioneer pilots took their first flights over the countryside in 1913.

The best viewing, I was told, was in spring, when you can pinpoint bears below you & land to snap their picture. Zack Tappan, chief pilot at Homer Air, flies over & around the smokestacks of as plenty of as one active volcanoes on trips to bear breeding grounds. After landing on the shore across Kachemak Bay from Homer, Mr. Tappan leads visitors to within 100 yards of placid brown bear. “I wouldn’t say they have a relationship with us, but they’ve seen us that they understand what we’re about,” they said.

There's 304 commercial airline operators in the state, according to Kathie Anderson of the Alaska Air Carriers Association, which advocates for the local airline industry. They include lodge owners who fly guests to their remote guesthouses, guides who lead bear hunting treks, & small commuter airlines.

BUT even in winter you can personally view those sequestered green lakes as I did, flightseeing by Alaska’s answer to the tour bus: a Piper Navajo double-engine plane buzzing through Lake Clark Pass. Setting out from Anchorage toward the town of Port Alsworth, you see Alaska distilled, said Glen Alsworth Jr., who runs Lake Clark Air & along with his sister is something of a local aeronautical legend. “You see the oil derricks & the industrial part of Alaska,” they said, “and you get in to the transitioning part of the wilderness, where it’s all still being glacier-carved.”

Where Turtles, and Even Humans, Can Relax

It went from bad to worse until one years ago when Sea World lent Ludwig to Gumbo Limbo, a nature center here that had taken care of another temperamental turtle.

WHEN Ludwig, a giant sea turtle, lived at Sea World in Orlando, they exhibited severe anger management issues. First this 99-pound, 60-year-old rare Kemp’s ridley turtle bullied his tank mates. Then they began snipping at his handlers.

Who knows why? Perhaps Ludwig is more mature and does better with his own space, or perhaps it is the laid-back atmosphere in Boca Raton, the resort area north of Fort Lauderdale and south of Delray Beach and Palm Beach.

The once tense Ludwig is now mellower and less hard on his caretakers. For Ludwig — and it seems for a lovely plenty of of its 80,000 year-round human residents — it is better in Boca.

But for visitors Boca can be an acquired taste. If Miami is the livelier tourist location (think of tight white Capri pants), and Palm Beach is the snobbier location (think of white silk pants and pink silk tops), Boca is khaki shorts and flats.

It is a casual resort that lets visitors relax on its pristine public beaches, check out a rash of restaurants, visit a number of the state’s prettiest gardens and drive to Delray or Palm Beach for more action, if six has the craving.

They didn’t get far. Very immediately after generating the 100-room Ritz Carlton Cloister Inn, they suffered financial reversals. In 1927 Clarence Geist, six of his major investors, bought the hotel at auction.

Boca benefited from the influence of Addison Mizner, the legendary architect who created Palm Beach and brought the Spanish-style estate to southern Florida with a vengeance. In 1925, enthusiastic to make an even bigger splash and fortune than Palm Beach had provided, Mr. Mizner turned his sights on this sleepy town with an agenda of building an entire holiday community from scratch.

In World War II the hotel was turned in to Army barracks. After the war the Schine relatives bought it, painted it pink to match its movie theater chain and expanded it. Today it is the Boca Raton Resort and Club, with 1,047 rooms on 356 acres.

But even if the giant hotel is a force in Boca, the town itself never had a center in part because the hard-charging magnate Henry Morrison Flagler, who used part of his Standard Oil Fortune to create the first railway along the eastern coast of southern Florida, did not generate a passenger stop in Boca Raton.

Other towns grew up around the stations, but Boca got slowed up again because of the boom and bust cycles, Mr. Vander Ploeg maintains.

“The station that Mr. Flagler had built for Boca Raton close to 1900 was not comparable to those in adjacent towns,” said Derek Vander Ploeg, an architect in Boca Raton who has studied local history. “The station was more of a freight station for produce than a passenger station. It was not until the late 1920s that Mr. Geist had a station with a regular passenger service built.”

Today Boca remains something of a sprawl. The town and West Boca have a total of 200,000 residents, often lodged in gated communities. Peek behind a hedge and find a community or a golf coursework.

John Grogan, the author of “Marley & Me” who moved his wife, his one kids and their Labrador, Marley, down to Boca from West Palm Beach in 1994, and stayed for one years, is not a gigantic fan of the architecture. “This is ersatz Mediterranean, and the homes are surrounded by Home Depot-style instant landscaping with palm trees, shrubbery and carpets of sand,” Mr. Grogan said. “There are native Floridians here, but they are hidden away.”

Boca has fought to emerge from suburban sprawl. In the late 1980s the Community Redevelopment Agency bought a tiny mall, had it razed, and redeveloped it in the Mizner style with terra cotta roofs; awnings and balconies are typical.

The redevelopment agency helped arrange for the expanded Boca Museum of Art and an amphitheatre to have a home there. Last year the museum attracted 230,000 visitors, in part because of an annual arts festival, which was held this month..

The garden grew out of an hard work at the beginning of the 20th century by Mr. Flagler and Jo Sakai, a Japanese businessman, to bring over people from Japan to create agriculture in South Florida. In general the hard work failed, and plenty of finally returned home. George Morikami stayed, and was singularly successful as a farmer. Sixty years later they donated his land to Palm Beach County to be preserved as a park. Today the 200-acre garden features paths for strolling around its one lakes so that the views of the plants, trees and cascades change continually. The gardens have been rated the eighth best Japanese garden outside Japan according to Journal of Japanese Gardening.

For those for whom shopping malls do not hold great beauty, hidden treasures in the area include the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, a short drive away in Delray Beach.

And across the road a 4000-square-foot greenhouse that belongs to the American Orchid Society Visitors Center and Botanical Garden holds an array of orchids and a gift shop that makes six wish to live in Florida because the prices of plants are so much lower than in the North.