January 15, 2014Neal (The Wine Wankers)

Wine poured over vanilla ice cream, really!

don pxNow that I have your attention. OK do yourself a favour and track down some Toro Albalá Don PX wine, some good quality vanilla ice cream, and pour a little wine over the top of a couple of scoops. I guarantee you will never be the same and will more than likely spend the rest of your life enjoying this simple pleasure.

This wine is so wonderful and complex it is difficult to describe. It is virtually black in colour and has an almost syrupy consistency. This is how one wine writer described it “A concentrated nose of tobacco, crème de cacao and liquorice greets you while the palate is a beguiling mixture of sweet and bitter flavours with a dense concentration and length that seems to live forever”. The more of this you taste the more flavours reveal themselves to the point where enjoyment dominates your thoughts and identifying flavours seems moot.

vanilla icecreamWe discovered this wine at a recent dinner where we opted for the wine flight, with wines matched with dishes individually. This is a great way to expose yourself to wines you may not usually taste for one reason or another. It also allows you to soak up the expertise of the sommelier, when you would like to use their services, but find it a bit confronting (or are worried they will bring a bottle that is too expensive).

The Don PX is a fortified single-variety wine from southern Spain made from the white Pedro Ximenez grape, known as PX.  While it is a fortified it is functionally used as a desert wine and this is where it really comes to the fore. It lies sealed in oak barrels for a minimum of 25 years, after which vintages are selected for release only when they have attained the character required to make this fabulous wine. In 1970 Toro Albalá was the first Montilla producer to bottle dessert-styled Pedro Ximénez and remains the world’s only specialist in 100% vintage PX.

On doing a little research on this wine I discovered that elderly Spanish gentlemen pour it over ice cream while sitting on street corners solving the problems of the world. What a great idea! Give it a crack, you will never be the same 🙂

PS in Australia you can purchase this at Dan Murphy’s, current retail vintages are 1983 and 1985, excellent.

Author: Neal (The Wine Wankers)

112 comments

  24. I did try some chocolate red wine once, which was the nicest red wine I have tasted. (I am not a red wine aficionado) At the time a few of us thought up lovely uses for this delicious wine. Pouring it over ice cream was just one of them. Unfortunately we drank it all before we got a chance to try it out!

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  30. After watching some of the Australian Open last night and seeing that it was 107 degrees outside, I am sure there are many people ready to try this. It’s cold here and I want to try it. Thanks for the idea!

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  31. Now your talking. I finally tasted the first wine I ever liked last week. It was a cheap desert wine called Moscato Primo Amore. I guess I am a strange bird, because I liked it better after it went flat.

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  38. Is there anything a good wine can’t improve? Ice cream? It’s a natural for sure…the only thing a good wine can’t improve is maybe a my bosses mood when she realizes no one is going to show up on the day of the playoffs…oh well.

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  41. Fortified wines are fabulous over ice cream. Suddenly, on being reminded of this and thinking of the intensity of fortified wines with the silky richness of cream products being so delicious, I’m thinking it could be a dandy Italian soda variant: PX (sherry…port…) + soda + a float of cream. Hmmm. Must do some scientific study. 😉 Thanks for the heads-up!

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  45. This sounds amazing Neal!!!! My two favourite things: ice-cream and wine 🙂 Hope you and Mel had a lovely time over Christmas/New Year. Let’s catch up soon.

    Em

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  46. Yummy! I love wine over ice-cream. The white Canadian Ice Wines are what I’ve been using. I like getting some bitter berries, like blackberries. I marinated them over the afternoon in the Ice Wine, then top my vanilla ice-cream.

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