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The First Ice Wine Ever Produced
This 1974 Hainle 'Eiswein' started it all; the first ice wine produced anywhere. It is currently appraised at $1 million per bottle!
Hainle Vineyards Estate Winery is renowned around the world for its high-end ice wines … and apparently thieves like their products too.
Sunday morning thieves broke in to the Peachland winery and made off with roughly $30,000 worth of Hainle's best vintages. Included in the haul were rare 1983 and 1984 Riesling ice wines worth about $9,800 and $7,900. They are among the oldest ice wines in the world.
Owner Walter Huber says the thieves came in through the back door and tripped the alarm system, but
“So he basically came in through the back door here and somehow they opened it,” said Walter Huber, owner of Hainle Vineyards, as he described the break-in. “They obviously tripped off alarm system so they had very little time to get in here.”
It could have been much worse. Huber’s winery was featured in a Global Okanagan News story about ice wines on Friday. Huber says many of the wines featured in the story were targeted by the thieves.
He believes the one product they were after was a 1978 Riesling, which was the first commercial ice-wine produced in North America. That vintage is appraised at a jaw-dropping $1 million per bottle.
Those bottles were in a safe in the winery, but were not found by the thieves.
This was the second time Huber has lost a rare, older vintage. In 2006 one of his 1978 vintages was stolen from his car while it was parked in the Lower Mainland.