It is a perennial foodie problem: you like wine, and you like ice cream, but sadly they just don’t go together.

An American dairy may, however, have created the solution: ice cream that is made with wine.

Mercer’s Dairy, a dairy farm in Boonville, New York which dates back to the 1930s, offers eight flavours of the adult-only treat, including riesling, cherry merlot, peach white zinfandel and sparkling strawberry.

Owner Roxaina Hurlburt first had the idea for the sweet treat when guests at a food event in Washington in 2005 started dolloping Mercer’s ice cream in their glasses of wine (the dairy’s stall happened to be next to a wine one).

She and her niece Ruth Mignerey spent years developing the recipe, as they tried to work out how to get the ice cream to freeze – a difficult thing to do when high quantities of alcohol are involved.