For two weeks we followed Riesling, dry to off-dry, and I promised the sweet end of the journey was coming. Here it is, and it arrives with a small confession: this week’s wine is not Riesling at all. It is Vidal, and the reason why is the whole story.

To make icewine, the grapes have to survive on the vine for months after every other grape has been picked, hanging there through frost and snow and the first hard freezes, without rotting, dropping or shrivelling to nothing. That is brutal on a grape. Most noble varieties, Riesling included, can do it, but it is risky: thin skins split, birds and rot take their share, and a sudden warm spell can ruin the crop. Vidal is built for exactly this. It is a French-American hybrid, bred for cold-hardiness, with thick skins that resist rot and cling to the vine through the worst of winter. It is, quite literally, the grape that hangs on.

That toughness is why Vidal became the classic Niagara icewine grape. It delivers the freeze reliably, with high acid and generous fruit, exactly the apricot, honey and marmalade profile icewine wants. Riesling icewine exists too, and it is prized, more delicate, more age-worthy, with that flinty Riesling line, but it is the riskier, costlier choice. Vidal is the dependable workhorse that turned Canadian icewine from a rare wonder into an everyday one.

Here is the point worth carrying out of the whole arc. We treat the grape as the headline, but at the sweet extreme the method and the place are the real authors. Icewine is defined by the freeze, not the variety. Two different grapes, Riesling and Vidal, can both make it, and the wine tastes more like the technique than like either grape. Sometimes the useful question is not “what grape,” it is “what was done to it, and where.”

Like rosé or sparkling wines, icewine is about the wine style - rather than being specific to any one grape.

So the summer’s three wines are not one grape three ways. They are three points on a single spectrum of sweetness: off-dry Washington Riesling, bone-dry Finger Lakes Riesling, and this, sweet Niagara Vidal. One idea, sweetness as a choice shaped by place and method, traced from one end to the other.