It’s after dinner and you’re debating whether you should have another glass of red wine or a bowl of ice cream. But, what if I told you that you don’t have to choose! You can have the best of both worlds. How yummy does this red wine float look? It tastes as good as it looks too.
After a long day of adulting, you deserve a dessert cocktail like this, and wine and ice cream take dessert cocktails to the next level.
The wine connoisseur might say that it’s sacrilegious to combine wine and ice cream. I say, you only live once. Don’t deprive yourself of this delicious concoction. You loved ice cream as a kid, now you love wine and ice cream. It’s only right.
What You’ll Need & How Long it Takes
This red wine float takes about 5 minutes to make and all you need is red wine, ice cream, seltzer and chocolate syrup. It’s a single serving so you can experiment with different flavors of ice cream and seltzer to make it exactly how you like it.
Rich chocolate ice cream tends to pair well with red wine because the berry notes in the wine go well with chocolate. You’ll want to choose a red wine that is slightly sweet and has some fruitiness to it. I chose Snow Farm Vineyard’s Marquette red wine. It has hints of red berries, plum, and finishes with a taste of black cherry.
I chose ice cream from our neighbors at Island Ice Cream in Grand Isle, Vermont. They source the milk for their small-batch ice cream from local Vermont dairy farms. The quality of their ice cream is unmatched – dare I say move over Ben & Jerry’s!
Every year Seven Days awards local businesses with the title of “Best in Vermont” as part of their Seven Daisies awards. The best housemade ice cream award has gone to Island Ice Cream every year since the category was created!
They have over 50 flavors, including Chocolate Supreme, which worked perfectly in this red wine float recipe. I also experimented with adding their raspberry sorbet into this float. It was delish! If you’re a chocolate purist, I hear you, and using only chocolate is also just as (if not more) delicious.
Red Wine Float Recipe
Ingredients
Chocolate syrup
1/2 cup chocolate ice cream
1/2 cup red wine
Seltzer/soda water
Directions
Drizzle chocolate syrup to cover the bottom of a 16 oz. pint glass. Scoop ice cream into the glass. If you’re mixing two flavors, do about a 1/4 cup of each flavor. Pour the red wine over the ice cream.
Top the glass off with the soda water…about half a cup. I tried black cherry soda water in this recipe to see if it would pair well with the black cherry flavors in the wine and it was great. Plain will work just as well. Go slowly because the float will immediately start to fizz and create those beautiful bubbles. You don’t want it to overflow too much.
