(MunchiesVice) - It’s a week before Christmas, it’s 7 degrees Celsius outside, and it’s pissing rain all over Quebec.

A year ago, the province was getting pummelled by snow in one of the most brutal winters in recent memory, but this time around, Quebec looks more like the Pacific Northwest than le grand nord Canadien.

“Last winter was brutal. It made no fucking sense how cold it was,” Jean Joly says. “Because my vines were protected and buried, it was fine. The only ones that didn’t survive were my merlot.”

Normally, losing that much merlot would be a crisis for any vineyard, but Joly is the owner of Vignoble du Marathonien in Havelock, Quebec, where he makes a wide range of wines—the most sought-after of which is his ice wine.

For those uninitiated with the golden nectar of the North, ice wine is a very intense, very sweet dessert wine made from grapes that have been frozen on the vine. It’s a process which naturally extracts water by freezing it, thus concentrating the sugar of each grape and giving the wine its signature sweetness. Obviously, for this to happen, you need a lot of cold weather, which is why Canada is a global leader in ice wine production.

Given that frost is quite literally the mortal enemy of grapevines, Canadian winemakers have to resort to pretty extreme means of protection to protect their harvest. These methods include burying the vines underground, installing huge frost towers, or even renting helicopters to fly over vineyards and keep as much cold air away from the vines as possible. 

Ice wine makers, on the other hand, actually welcome the cold, and with a particularly warm winter ahead, many ice wine producers are having to contend with an entirely new set of challenges. “I’ve been making wine here for 25 years,” Joly says. “And this is the first time that it’s been so warm so late in the year, and it’s looking like it’s going to stay this way until early January.”

While many wine producers in the province are embracing warmer temperatures and seizing the opportunity to grow Vinis vinifera grapes like chardonnay, merlot, and cabernet—inconceivable a generation ago—ice wine production is actually averse to the sharp climb in temperature. “The danger right now is that the grapes are very soft right now and very fragile,” says Joly. “If it were colder, the grapes would be better protected.”

The structural issues of the grape are complicated by the fact that not just any frozen grape can be used to make ice wine. It’s a tightly controlled industry, and in order to be classified as a proper ice wine, the grapes have to reach a temperature of –8 degrees Celsius. Right now, at 7 degrees, it’s about 15 degrees too warm.

As a result, there is a possibility that the Marathonien vineyard makes no ice wine at all this year. “It’s too early to tell,” says Joly. “I haven’t made a decision yet. But if things continue like this until mid-January, then it’s something we’re going to have to consider. We have no choice but to adapt to the climate.”