Taste of the Week. Killahora Rare Apple Ice-Wine

Taste of the Week

Killahora Rare Apple Ice-Wine

Barry (left) and Dave
show their amazing ice wine.

This superb drink, particularly with its aromas and finish, speaks very much of the orchard, maybe even a touch of warm apple tart. Mostly, there is on the palate a well-balanced tension between the dry and the sweet, a sweetness that is not at all sticky. “A bittersweet symphony,” they say themselves. Not a bad summing up of our Taste of the Week.

There was a lot of love expressed for it on Twitter when it made its public debut recently. One enthusiast was so impressed that she cancelled her standing order for importing Canadian Ice Wine!

How do they make it? The juice of their rare apples (114 varieties growing here on south facing slopes) is concentrated using freezing temperatures and slowly thawed. The resulting beautiful deep and rich must is slowly fermented for a year and stopped before completion, leaving half of the apple sugars intact…nothing is added, so the abv is a low 10.8%.

I came across this a few months back as a matching drink for the superb cheese menu at SpitJack. Beautiful and rich, it was perfect with the cheeses that we had and with the Ardsallagh Ash Pyramid in particular. More recently, I got the same magnificent result with the St Tola Ash Log, the two premium products mutually enhancing.

And where is Killahora? You might well ask. If you are lucky enough to get a bottle of the Ice Wine you’ll see a corner of an ordnance survey map from 1837 showing an orchard here on these warm slopes close to the village of Glounthaune just east of Cork City. Well over a hundred types of rare apples growing here now and it is here too that the bittersweet cider Johnny Fall Down is produced.

Killahora Orchard  

Killahora

Glounthaune

Co.Cork

PHONE 021 486 8177

EMAIL info@johnnyfalldown.ie