Icewine sounds like a gimmick until you understand the gamble behind it. You leave the grapes on the vine long after every other grape has been picked, through autumn, into winter, and you wait. You are waiting for a hard freeze, cold enough to freeze the water inside each berry solid while the sugar and acid stay liquid. Then you pick and press the grapes while they are still frozen, and only a few thick, intensely sweet drops run out. The water stays behind as ice. What you catch is the concentrated essence of the fruit.

The catch is the weather. You need a deep, reliable freeze, around minus eight Celsius or colder, at the right moment, with the fruit still healthy on the vine. In most of the world that happens only in the occasional brutal winter, which is why German Eiswein is a rare and expensive lottery. Canada solved the problem by being Canada.

The Niagara Peninsula sits between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment, a long ridge that curves through the region. The lake moderates the season just enough to ripen the fruit, and then winter arrives, dependably and hard, every single year. That combination, a long enough summer and a guaranteed deep freeze, is rare on earth. It made Canada the largest icewine producer in the world, and the Niagara Peninsula its heart.

Reliability changes everything about the wine. Where icewine elsewhere is a now-and-then accident, here it is a craft you can practice and refine every vintage. The result is a wine of startling consistency: intensely sweet, golden, full of apricot, honey, mango and orange marmalade, and, crucially, lifted by a racing acidity that the freeze concentrates right alongside the sugar.

Three steps in, by place and method rather than label:

• Affordable: a 375ml Vidal icewine from the broader Niagara Peninsula. Bright apricot and honey, the welcoming way in.
• Better: a single-estate icewine, Vidal or Riesling, from a named site such as Niagara-on-the-Lake or the Beamsville Bench. More layered: dried apricot, marmalade, a deeper line of acid.
• Luxury: a Riesling icewine or an aged Vidal from a top site, built to keep, where the honey slowly turns toward caramel, dried fruit and saffron over years.

Place comes before packaging, always. Before the grape, before the producer, there is a lake, an escarpment, and a winter you can count on. That dependable freeze is the whole reason this wine exists.