It’s often claimed that wine can be an obliging partner to dessert: A ripe Cabernet Sauvignon with chocolate, for example, or a honeyed Sauternes with pound cake. Try as I might, I’ve never convinced my own taste buds to sign on to this proposition. Alcohol and sugar don’t need each other. Better to wash down a sugary dessert with black coffee.

But along comes a new product called Wine Cellar Sorbets which has complicated the confluence of wine and dessert. Made in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, these sorbets are flavored with a range of real, label-designated wines, boiled down until alcohol is reduced to under 5%. They’re sweet, but not nearly as sweet as standard issue sorbets. Based on my tasting of four flavors, they do actually bear a taste resemblance to the wines from which they’re made. Better yet, they have a fighting chance to compliment certain desserts that don’t work with actual wine. A scoop of the deeply purple-tinted 2005 California Cabernet Sauvignon sorbet, for example, would be a cool contrast to a slice of flourless chocolate cake. And a dollop of New York Sauterne NV sorbet would give a lift to lemon pound cake. One recent evening, I topped a slice of blueberry pie topped with a scoop of 2004 New York Riesling sorbet. The synergy was strong.

Wine Cellar Sorbets are the brainchild of Queens-born chef David Zablocki. He began experimenting with them three years ago during a fellowship at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley branch. “I was hearing the standard answers about matching wine with dessert and was unconvinced,” he said. “So I decided to go the sorbet route.” Mr. Zablocki eventually put his wine sorbets on the menu of a restaurant in Big Sur where he was executive chef. In 2002, he returned to New York, intending to open a wine bar in Williamsburg with his boyhood best friend, Bret Birnbaum. “My idea was to cut a little window into the façade of the bar and sell scoops of wine sorbet through it,” he says. “But when we realized there was no comparable product in the market, we scrapped the whole bar concept and started our business.”

Since Wine Cellar Sorbets’ launch last spring, it’s picked up 45 retail customers in New York and New Jersey, ranging from Whole Foods to a small market on Fire Island. The two partners make and deliver the sorbets ($6.99 a pint), sometimes starting on their route before dawn. “We’re entrepreneurs,” Mr. Zablocki said. “You don’t expect us to sleep!”

Mr. Zablocki sources his wines from as far away as California’s Central Coast and as nearby as Brotherhood Winery in the Hudson Valley. Of the seven flavors currently available, my favorites are the 2005 California Cabernet Sauvignon, which has a bracing edge of tannin along with a curranty tang, and the floral New York May Wine NV. The NV New York Champagne NV didn’t have quite enough taste and, of course, it doesn’t really come from Champagne. When I mentioned that to Mr. Zablocki, he said, “Just wait for me to do a Veuve Clicquot!”

MISSING IN ACTION

The choice of wines available in New York shops is vast, even overwhelming. Yet, amid such a global bounty, one of California’s most distinguished wineries is glaringly absent on retail shelves. It’s called Smith Madrone, now in the midst of its 35th vintage high on the upper slopes of Spring Mountain high over the Napa Valley. That this label can’t find a place in any New York shop is not, I believe, due to lack of quality or value. It’s because of the difficulty of selling the kind of wines that Smith Madrone makes.

The winery, owned by brothers Stuart and Charles Smith, bottles just three wines: cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, and riesling. In an era when most California wines are riper and more alcoholic than ever before, the Smith brothers make traditional wines, maybe even throwback wines. They’re dry-farmed for intensity and harvested ripe, but not overly so. The result is wines which have alcohol between 12% and 13%, once a common level but now the exception in an era of wines that routinely reach 15% alcohol or higher. “Some of these huge wines can be seductive and fruit forward, or they can hit you so that your eyes bulge out, but then you say, ‘Now what?’ They’ve nothing behind them. These wines will not age.” Meanwhile, these voluptuary wines do fetch high scores from wine critics, notably Robert M. Parker Jr. in his Wine Advocate newsletter.

Smith Madrone wines, especially the cabernet sauvignon, are typically unyielding upon release. But the wines invariably blossom as the years go by. I don’t believe there is any other dry California riesling that is the equal of Smith Madrone’s in its improvement after 10 years and beyond. But such wines are a tough sell. “For many years, we’ve tried to make wines with elegance, restraint, and grace,” Mr. Smith said, “and we got our brains beat out in the marketplace.”

Sadly, that’s currently the case in New York, although the wines are available in half a dozen other states, notably Illinois and California (check wine-searcher.com) and direct from the winery (smithmadrone.com). The deeply flavored 2003 Napa Valley Chardonnay ($27) and 2001 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($38) are currently available, as is the 2000 Napa Valley Riesling ($50). This last wine, simultaneously floral and earthy, is what great Alsacian-style riesling is all about.