Original photo by MaxBaumann/ iStock
When you think of wine, places such as Bordeaux, Tuscany, and Napa Valley tend to come to mind first. One place you probably don’t think of is Antarctica, and yet vino is indeed made on the world’s coldest, windiest continent.
Fittingly, it’s an ice wine, a dessert wine made from grapes that freeze naturally while still on the vine, and it’s made by just one person: James Pope, whose McMurdo Dry Valleys vineyard is located on the side of the continent near New Zealand. The high saline content of the “soil” (which is closer in texture to sand) gives the wine a unique salty flavor.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThe Antarctic Polar Desert, which accounts for the vast majority of the continent’s landmass, has an area of 5.5 million square miles and receives as little as 50 millimeters of precipitation per year.
As that soil is in permafrost throughout much of the year, Pope’s wine is cultivated in the summer with vines placed at least 60 feet apart — any closer and they wouldn’t get enough nutrients. Some of those nutrients are obtained through Adélie penguin droppings, though it may take a sommelier to properly describe the effect that has on taste. Though it isn’t produced on a large scale and can’t exactly be bought at your local wine store, the ice wine’s mere existence is testament to the scientific — and culinary — ingenuity on display in Antarctica.
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“Antarctica” means “______.”
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“Antarctica” means “opposite the north.”
Dinosaurs roamed Antarctica.
Antarctica wasn’t always cold enough to reach a temperature of -133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (as can sometimes happen nowadays). During the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago, the continent was ice-free and blanketed by forests — and inhabited by dinosaurs.
Among the dinos who roamed Antarctica were the carnivorous Cryolophosaurus and the armored, aptly named Antarctopelta, neither of which was immortalized in the Jurassic Park franchise. Antarctica began freezing about 34 million years ago, when the greenhouse climate that had been stable since the dinosaurs went extinct drastically cooled and created the icehouse phase the continent is still in today.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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