Written and photographed by Devina Brown

With the weather getting warmer in Hollywood, we decided to cool off with a glass of Inniskillin Icewine... wishing we could actually sport our cool winter trapper hats and suffer like you poor creatures out there in less cool, colder climates! We nibbled on a light lunch that included a lovely salad garnished with fresh flowers (food expert cum editor Mui-Hai Chu sure can whip up some tasty vittles!) and the icewine was the perfect dessert. Furthermore, eiswein is perfect for après and as we at Flaunt like to do,  it's perfect for long afternoons of glamour and meddlesome publicists.

So what exactly is Icewine?! Aptly named: grapes are left on the vine to freeze during the winter, thus continuing to gain natural sugar. Paired with a fine chocolate, we recommend Earth Alchemy Raw Organic Vegan Rose Petal Chocolates, a normal dessert becomes decadent! Even more so when you consider that only one drop of wine can be squeezed out of each grape! Icewine hails from Germany, with Canada being the world's second largest producer. Not surprising, since they both have ridiculously cold winters... wouldn't you be drinking?

Finally, a little bit about Inniskillin:

Where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario, stands Inniskillin Winery. In the early seventies Karl Kaiser, an Austrian chemist and home wine maker teamed up with Donald Ziraldo, who ran a grapevine nursery, and the pair opened the Inniskillin Winery. Determined to create better quality Canadian wines, they planted a Vitis vinifera vineyard (European grape variety), becoming the only vineyard of its kind in the Niagara Peninsula at the time. Unfortunately, sourcing these types of grapes proved a challenge, so Ziraldo planted a vinifera vineyard, the base of their future wines. In '84 the pair made a decision that would ultimately put Inniskillin on the wine radar. They left the grapes on the vine for the winter and the combo of Niagara's soil and freezing winters produced an ice wine that has won the winery multiple awards.

We'll leave you with a cool fact: Ziraldo lobbied and received the first post-prohibition license in the area since 1929. Aaah sweet success...