What to Pour With Your Pint

Wine and ice cream pairings have a reputation for not working. Pick the right bottle and they get along fine, starting with Cherry Garcia and a pour of port.

Most of us eat ice cream the same way. The pint comes out of the freezer, a spoon comes out of the drawer, and whatever was in the wine glass at dinner either gets finished first or pushed to the side. Nobody thinks to open a bottle for the ice cream.

That's a missed chance, because a few wines were practically made for it. Some of them come from Portugal and Spain, where people have been pouring sweet wine over dessert for a long time, and one of them belongs next to the most famous cherry ice cream in America.

The one rule for pairing wine with ice cream

The wine has to be at least as sweet as the ice cream, and ideally sweeter. Sugar in food makes the wine next to it taste drier, more acidic and more bitter, so a dry red that tasted lovely with dinner turns thin and sour against a spoonful of anything sweet. Wine pros say this about every dessert, and ice cream sits at the very sweet end of the dessert table.

Cold is the other thing to know about. Cold dulls your sense of sweetness and flavor, which is why melted ice cream tastes sweeter than it did straight from the freezer. Let the pint sit on the counter for five minutes before you scoop, and keep the scoops small, so you're tasting the pairing instead of numbing your tongue.

Cherry Garcia and port

Cherry Garcia started with a note on a bulletin board. In 1986 a Grateful Dead fan pinned the idea up at her local Ben & Jerry's scoop shop in Maine, and as someone from Maine I'm obligated to mention that. The shop never passed it along, so she sent a postcard to the company's headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, suggesting a cherry flavor named for Jerry Garcia. Ben & Jerry's released it on February 15, 1987, and sent the first eight pints to Garcia himself. He approved, reportedly saying he was fine with it as long as nobody named a motor oil after him. It was the company's best-selling flavor for a decade, until Half Baked passed it in 2013.

The pint is cherry ice cream with whole cherries and fudge flakes, a cousin of the chocolate-covered cherry, and it wants a port with dark fruit and enough sweetness to stand up to it. The bottle in the photo is the one I reach for, a ten-year tawny made from Barbera by Château d'Estienne, estate grown in the Sierra Foothills rather than Portugal. Barbera is a grape that stays tart when other grapes go soft and heavy, and poured over the scoop, that tartness cuts through the cream and leaves hazelnut, dark cherry and a long warm finish. The cherries in the ice cream and the cherry in the wine find each other.

If you can't find a Barbera tawny, a ruby port from Portugal is the easy substitute. Ruby is the younger, fruit-first style, aged only a short time before bottling, so it keeps a deep red color and plenty of sweet cherry, plum and blackberry.

This is the one I use on people who chuckle at the whole idea. Some sommelier friends of mine thought I had lost it, so I had them over one evening at the firepit and handed each of them a bowl of Cherry Garcia with tawny poured over the top. Nobody argued after that. For me it goes back further than wine. On warm, muggy summer nights in Maine, dessert was ice cream with chocolate sauce out of a saucepan, eaten on the front steps. This is the same bowl with a better sauce.

Port and port-style wines run around 18 to 20 percent alcohol, so this is a small-glass pairing. Two or three ounces in a small wine glass is plenty for one pint shared between two people. A basic ruby or a reserve ruby from a big Porto house costs less than a dinner bottle of Cabernet, and once it's open it keeps for a few weeks in the fridge.

If port feels too heavy for a warm night, try a glass of Brachetto d'Acqui, a lightly sparkling sweet red from Piedmont that tastes of strawberries and roses. It's lighter, lower in alcohol, and fun to pour.

The rest of the freezer

Vanilla and Pedro Ximénez sherry. This is the one to try if you only try one. PX comes from Jerez in southern Spain, where the Pedro Ximénez grapes are dried in the sun until they're nearly raisins, then fortified and aged in a solera. It pours like dark syrup and tastes of figs, raisins and molasses. Spooned over a scoop of good vanilla, it's the serving suggestion that turns up again and again in notes on González Byass and Lustau PX. It takes about thirty seconds and looks like you planned it.

Chocolate and chocolate fudge. Ruby port or a Barbera tawny, or PX if the ice cream is very rich. Dark chocolate needs a wine sweeter than it is, or the wine pulls out the bitterness and can taste metallic.

Coffee, salted caramel and butter pecan. Reach for a 10-year tawny port. Tawny spends years in wooden casks, where the red fruit of young port fades into caramel, toffee and walnut, the same flavors that are already in the bowl. Of everything here, this is the pairing that tastes most like a grown-up idea.

Strawberry. Brachetto d'Acqui, the sparkling red from Piedmont, smells so much like strawberries that the pairing is almost a mirror. Serve it well chilled.

Peach, lemon sorbet and other light fruit. Moscato d'Asti, also from Piedmont, is lightly fizzy, gently sweet and about 5 percent alcohol, with peach and orange blossom in the glass. It's the easiest bottle on this list to drink a second glass of, and it won't flatten a delicate sorbet the way port would.

From the regular wine aisle

You don't need a specialty shop for any of this. Most decent grocery stores carry a handful of bottles in the $12 to $25 range that work with ice cream, and the only skill involved is reading the label for sweetness.

Cherry Garcia and chocolate: Lambrusco. Look for a bottle labeled amabile (semi-sweet) or dolce (sweet), and skip the ones marked secco, which are dry. Lambrusco is a fizzy red from Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, full of cherry and berry, and it should be served cold. It's a cheerful, cheaper cousin to the port pairing.

Vanilla, cookies and cream, birthday cake: Prosecco labeled Extra Dry. The name is backwards. Extra Dry Prosecco is sweeter than Brut, with 12 to 17 grams of sugar per liter against Brut's 12 or fewer. The bubbles cut through the cream, and a scoop of vanilla with Extra Dry Prosecco poured around it is about as close to a grown-up root beer float as wine gets.

Peach, mango and lemon sorbet: off-dry Riesling. A German Riesling labeled Kabinett or Spätlese will have some sweetness, and so will plenty of Rieslings from Washington and New York. Many American bottles print a sweetness scale on the back label running from dry to sweet, so aim for medium sweet or sweeter. The acidity keeps fruit sorbet tasting bright.

Strawberry and raspberry: Moscato. The everyday Moscato on the grocery shelf, often from California, is sweet, peachy and low in alcohol. It's the easy version of the Moscato d'Asti above.

Rocky road and anything with peanut butter: Zinfandel. If you want a red you already know, a ripe, jammy Zinfandel from Lodi or Amador County comes closest to working, though a dry red will always lose some ground to the sugar. A late-harvest Zinfandel solves that problem completely, and a half bottle doesn't cost much.

Turning it into a tasting at home

This makes a better party than most dinner parties. Buy three pints, say Cherry Garcia, a plain vanilla and a coffee or salted caramel, and three bottles to match: a ruby port, a PX sherry and a 10-year tawny. Set out small cups or ramekins, one small scoop of each flavor per person, and pour about two ounces of each wine.

Taste the wine first, then the ice cream, then the wine again, and pay attention to what changes on the second sip. Then swap the partners around and try the port with the vanilla and the PX with the cherry. Some of the swaps will work and some won't, and arguing about which is half the fun.

For the real lesson, keep a glass of whatever dry red you had with dinner on the table and try it with a spoonful of Cherry Garcia. It will taste sour and thin, which is the one rule showing up in your own mouth.

If you're the host, the job is mostly logistics. Pull the pints out before the guests sit down so the ice cream softens, chill the Brachetto and the Moscato if you're pouring them, and serve the port and sherry just below room temperature, a little cool in the hand. Have water on the table, and keep the pours small, because fortified wine adds up faster than ice cream does.

If you work in a restaurant or a tasting room, this is an easy way to make a guest's night. Most dining rooms bring the ice cream exactly as ordered and leave it there. Ask the table if they've ever tried it with port, offer a small pour on the house, and let them watch it go over the top. An open bottle of tawny keeps for weeks, so the pour costs almost nothing.

Quick answers

What wine goes with ice cream? A wine at least as sweet as the ice cream. Port, Pedro Ximénez sherry, Moscato d'Asti, Brachetto d'Acqui, Lambrusco amabile, Extra Dry Prosecco and off-dry Riesling all work. Dry table wines usually taste sour next to it.

What wine goes with Cherry Garcia? A port with dark fruit. A ten-year Barbera tawny from the Sierra Foothills or a ruby port from Portugal both match the cherries and the fudge flakes. Lambrusco amabile is the cheaper, lighter option.

Can you pour port over ice cream? Yes. Two or three ounces over a scoop softens the top and turns into a sauce. Pedro Ximénez sherry over vanilla works the same way.

What's a good inexpensive wine for ice cream? Look for Lambrusco labeled amabile, Prosecco labeled Extra Dry, or an off-dry Riesling, most of them $12 to $25 at a grocery store.

Is Extra Dry Prosecco dry? No. Extra Dry Prosecco is sweeter than Brut, which is why it works with vanilla ice cream.

Jane Williamson, the fan who pinned up that note in Maine, was eventually given a standing ovation and a year's supply of ice cream. I'd like to think she'd approve of the port.