Want to drink your wine and eat it too? Check out Wine Cellar Sorbet, a gourmet sorbet I found this week shopping at health food store Tunie's in Coral Springs.
The pint tubs of wine-flavored sorbet take the gourmet-ice-cream trend to another level. It comes in nine flavors, ranging from sangria to champagne to Cabernet Sauvignon, each costing about $5 a tub. Despite the fact that they supposedly taste just like the flavors of wine they're named after, the sorbets are alcohol-free and free of dairy, gluten, and fat. The ingredients listed are basically sugar, water, and wine extract.
But when I popped open a tub of Wine Cellar Sorbet Ruby Port last
night, I could tell right away I was going to be disappointed. The tub
I had purchased had obviously completely melted and then refrozen, and
it wasn't in the car ride home. Under the layer of cellophane sealing
the top was a collection of jagged ice crystals and a thick residue
from the sugar that had refrozen. The "creamy" texture the WCS website touts had been ruined. Instead, it was grainy with thick ice crystals throughout.
I dug out the top layer of sorbet and tossed it in the sink as well as
a layer near the sides, which left me with a suitable bit in the middle
of the pint. I scooped that bit out and gave it a try. It tasted and
smelled just like port. The aroma was sweet and a little jammy, with
that slightly buttery-aged flavor port has going on. If it were a bottle
of wine, it probably wouldn't be terribly complex stuff, but as the
front of the package mentioned, it did taste of sun-ripened cherries.
I'd love to try the other flavors of WCS, but I'd be hesitant if they had been so badly melted and refrozen like this one. I've had other ice creams from Tunie's (which I'll talk about in a future post), and they didn't have this problem, so I don't think it's the store. Maybe I just got unlucky and grabbed the wrong package.