Wine Wisdom: Vincotto should be your next ice cream topping

In rural Italy, there’s a style of wine that’s more of a syrup than a beverage. A sticky, sweet tincture that looks a little like the medicine Mary Poppins pours in different colours for the Banks children (did anyone else desperately want to try that?) vincotto literally translates into English as ‘cooked wine’. Mostly known in the Apulia region, but found in homes around the country, it’s often homemade rather than bought in shops due to its total disregard for any of the usual winemaking rules.

To make vincotto, you need to press your grapes, which if you’d like to follow Pliny the Elder’s lead, should be Primitivo, Negroamaro or Malvasia Nera. Then, without removing the grapes, stems and seeds from the juice, the resulting must is cooked over a slow heat for hours, gently reducing the liquid down into an unctuous grapey treacle. The Romans called it Sapa, and used it to flavour meat and to preserve and sweeten wine, and found it useful as a preservative. While it has the appearance of Balsamic vinegar, it’s not vinegary at all, although it is used in vincotto vinegars when the two are mixed together. It’s much more like pomegranate molasses in flavour and texture, and can be used in much the same way.

Should you find some, do as Rick Stein does: add it to your ragú for a real boost and depth of flavour instead of that glass of wine. I do think though, that since it’s normal for a Puglian to eat ricotta e vincotta, there’s a logical leap towards drizzling it on ice cream. It might not replace the vibrant neon of strawberry on my Mr Whippy, but as a topping for clotted cream or even strawberry flavoured gelato? Or, now that we’ve all got ice cream makers in our kitchens, as a robust flavouring all its own in a homemade goats milk ice cream? Now we’re talking.