I was ten years old in rural Maine and dessert came out of a saucepan.
Dark chocolate melted down with sugar into a heavy syrup. Summer strawberries cooked down on the stove until they collapsed. Butter and brown sugar pulled off the burner right at the edge of smoke. It went hot over a hard cold scoop of vanilla, and I carried the bowl out and sat on the steps and ate it there on a warm, muggy Maine summer night.
There was no plastic squeeze bottle in that house. Those came later.
A few weeks ago at Mo's by the River, a regular named Mike came in with a 1999 Merryvale Cabernet and poured some into my glass without being asked. There was tobacco under it, and it put me at Sunday dinner on my grandparents' farm in West Gardiner, fifty-some years back. Gramps with his pipe. Uncle Cliff with a cigar going. The whole room came up out of one swallow, and nobody had told me to look for it.
Ten year tawny port over vanilla ice cream does the same thing to me, and it puts me on those steps.
Somewhere along the way, restaurants decided dessert should be tidy. A stripe of fruit sauce dragged across a wide plate. A small glass of dessert wine set six inches from the bowl, with the idea that a guest will take a sip, then a bite, then a sip. The wine stays over there. The ice cream melts over here. Neither one does anything for the other, and the plates come back half full.
Port is what the saucepan grew into.
Why ice cream defeats most wine
Here is why it works, in the terms I would use standing in front of somebody. Ice cream is cold and it is fatty, and both of those shut your mouth down. The fat coats your tongue and mutes whatever comes next. The cold numbs everything and kills the smell, and most of what people call taste is smell. Send a regular glass of red wine into that and it has nothing left. It turns bitter and tinny against the cream, and the fruit it had ten minutes ago is gone.
Port survives it. It has the sugar to stand up to ice cream, which carries more of it than people assume. It has the body to hold together instead of thinning out on contact. And it has the strength to cut through the fat and clear your mouth for the next spoonful.
So it does not sit on the side. It goes over the top.
Which port to use, and which one to leave alone
Tawny is the one to reach for, and the reason is time in the barrel. Some ports get bottled young and still taste like fresh dark fruit. Tawny stays in the barrel for years, and the years change it. The color fades from purple toward amber. The fruit dries out. What comes back is closer to nuts, caramel, dried figs, and orange peel.
The number on the bottle, ten years or twenty, usually means the average age of what got blended in rather than a single harvest, though some bottles carry a vintage year alongside it. Ten is the right one for this. A forty or fifty year old bottle is meant to be sat with and thought about, and pouring it over ice cream wastes what somebody spent decades building. Tawny is also one of the few wines better slightly cool, which helps when it is going into a cold bowl.
What to pour over which ice cream
Poured over vanilla, it does what chocolate syrup only promised. It runs into the cracks and softens the top of the scoop. The cold takes the burn off it. It stops acting like a drink and starts acting like a warm nut and brown sugar sauce, and plain vanilla comes back tasting like toasted pecan, dried fig, and browned butter. Vanilla is the right one to start with because it stays out of the way.
Cookie dough is heavier and usually sits on your palate too long. The tawny is heavy enough to keep up and runs through the chocolate chunks with walnut and burnt sugar.
Strawberry wants a different bottle. A young dark port, a ruby, over strawberry rebuilds the cooked-down berries from the saucepan and puts plum and blackberry underneath them, so a plain summer flavor has something to stand on.
The people who chuckled
People chuckle when I describe this, so I stopped describing it. A scoop of vanilla, the port poured over the top, and a spoon.
The first time I did it in a dining room was at a well known casino steakhouse in Reno. The waitress told me I couldn't do that. I told her to grab a spoon. The look on her face went from horror to delight.
My somm friends thought I had lost it. I had them over one evening at the firepit and handed them Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia with tawny poured over it. Supermarket freezer, four dollars a pint. The cherry chunks and the cherry in the wine find each other. The fudge flakes snap against the cream. Cold, rich, a little bitter from the chocolate, dark fruit the whole way through, in one spoonful. Nobody argued after that.
A tawny from the Sierra Foothills, not Portugal
The bottle on my counter is a Château d'Estienne Barbera tawny, aged ten years, 2014, estate grown in the Sierra Foothills. Not Portugal. Barbera is a grape that stays tart when other grapes go soft and heavy, and that tartness went through the cream like a blade and left hazelnut and dark cherry and a long warm finish.
What restaurants are leaving on the table
Most restaurants never think about this at all. The ice cream gets ordered and the ice cream gets brought, exactly as ordered, and that is the end of the transaction. The dessert wine by the glass exists so the list can say it has one.
The move is small. Somebody at the table starts talking about ice cream, and the server asks whether they have ever tried it with port, then offers to bring a pour on the house. Then they watch what happens when it goes over the top. An open bottle of tawny keeps for weeks, which is more than can be said for most of what gets opened for a single glass, so the comped pour costs almost nothing. All of it is already behind the counter. The only thing being spent is attention on a course most dining rooms have written off.
The wine is better than the chocolate syrup was. The ice cream is better too. None of that is the reason I keep doing it.
It takes me back to the steps. Bowl on my knees, warm night, nothing to do afterward and nowhere to be. There is a specific happiness a kid has with ice cream in front of him, and I get a piece of it back every time that port goes over the top.
To the restaurant owners and the chefs, you're welcome.
Sources: The author's own tasting practice and recollection. Aging and style differences between tawny and ruby port per standard producer and WSET Level 3 material.
Patrick R. Dunn is the founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice working with winery owners, tasting room managers, hoteliers, and restaurateurs. He is WSET Level 3 certified and spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at six sites. He is the author of Stop Leading on Empty.