A gasp goes up across the province. How can he stand there, knee-deep in the stuff, in the place that produces more of it than anywhere else, and say such a thing?

Well, the thing of it is there’s a whole lot of not very good icewine out there with the taste and texture of pancake syrup, where the fruit has been subsumed by only sweetness and the acid is—what acid?—and the whole thing gives me a screaming pain in the incisors.

Do note that having been in this game long enough to know better, I said “most icewines”. There are some, a small happy handful, that are everything a good icewine ought to be: fresh, fruity, balanced, delicious. Perhaps one of these days, when the 6/49 stars are aligned, we’ll taste them together.

And yes, the whole thing about keeping ice ­wines a couple of months short of forever is a self-perpetuating silliness. It tastes better fresher. And yes, for sure, the cost of the stuff is another self-perpetuating et cetera. P.T. Barnum continues to be right.

Okay, that’s the curmudgeonry; here comes an exception.

Just out of the chute at Cawston’s micro ­winery, Orofino, is the 2005 Pinot Noir Merlot Icewine, proud product of its second vintage portfolio. Portfolio is a somewhat grandiose word when your total production, all varieties, is less than a thousand cases. That sort of ?volume won’t be causing Gallo to look with worry over its corporate shoulder. Or Mission Hill. Or, to put it in closer perspective, even Herder Winery, which is not far down the road from John and Virginia Webber’s little “straw bale” outfit in the Similkameen Valley.

Orofino’s initial release, last year, simply astonished with its amazing quality. There’s gorgeous Riesling this year, surprising and lovely Canadian Oak Chardonnay, a blend called Red Bridge Red, Late Harvest Muscat, this first-time-out “red” icewine, plus Pinot Noir (sold-out), Pinot Gris (sold-out), and Merlot-Cabernet (sold-out).

The idea of red icewine isn’t quite as exotic as it might sound, but it’s pretty rare. I can’t recall many others attempting it, except for Gehringer Brothers, which has a Cabernet Franc, and Paradise Ranch, which makes a Merlot, and Ontario’s Magnotta, with another Cabernet Franc. Domaine Combret does a Gamay Noir Rosé version, but all the rest of the 30-something icewines listed in the LDB system (there are many more available exclusively at various wineries) are white.

Of course there’s no reason why you couldn’t make a red icewine, so long as you have a gambler’s cool and leave some great grapes late on the vines. Which the Webbers do—and did.

And there it is, then: exquisite; fruitier and fresher than so many of the syrupy ones described above; with beautiful acid, a pale-pink colour in the glass, and all sorts of apple and pomegranate flavours in the mouth. It’s a stunning treat as dessert and a grand gift for the wine lover who has almost everything. ?A unique Canadian wine and a decadent indulgence, it’s typical of the leading-edge winemaking that goes on behind the Orofino label.

It’s one of the best icewines I’ve tasted since Walter Hainle’s first forays back in 1973 into the now-crowded field. I doubt many Lower Mainland stores are carrying any of the 55 cases. You’re reading right: 55 of them, the bottles 375 millilitres, $69.90 apiece. First you say “Ouch!” and then you say “Wow!” And then you try to figure out what you can sell—those oil shares would be good, the prices going down again—so that you can buy a box. Maybe at the winery’s Web site (www.orofinovine?yards.com/?), where there’s stock at least for the foreseeable-in-the-short-term future.

Speaking of Walter Hainle’s pioneering icewine efforts, why didn’t they put his picture on those new Canadian wine-and-cheese stamps the post office has issued? There’s this little bilingual booklet of eight times 51 cents (plus GST, of course) that you can buy, with a little easy history on both subjects: “Circa 1811, the first known winemaker in Canada, Corporal Johann Schiller, harvested some labrusca grapes in what is now Mississauga.”

The text goes on to pay tribute to Hainle, who made Canada’s first true icewine here in Peachland in ’73, and the fact that Inniskillin took a grand prize at Vinexpo in 1991 for its Vidal icewine. Apart from that, it’s all pretty bland and generic: a nod to Canadian Cheddar being our most important cheese, that’s about it.

The stamps themselves look, well, generic. There’s one with three glasses, another with a guy nosing some red wine with a bunch of barrels in the background. The cheese stamps just show a selection on a board and another trayful with some grapes being presented by a headless lady.

All right, so I suppose playing near-favourites by even mentioning real names is pretty gutsy, but I think the post office might have seen its way clear to maybe doing some identifying—like Oka, Cheddar, Ermite, and ditto for the wines; if not wineries, then at least maybe varietals we do well: Shiraz, Merlot, Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Vidal, et cetera.

Maybe there’s some collectible value here if you’re a philatelist, but otherwise the thing looks like one of those “Easy and Elegant Entertaining” pamphlets you might find at Home Depot. Somebody at the P.O. must actually drink some wine, eat some cheese, have an idea, an opinion.