The pudding season, and the fact that it’s currently Chocolate Week, make the perfect excuse to indulge in that still unsung bottle, a pudding wine. Our Victorian ancestors revelled in all manner of luscious mid-morning, mid-afternoon and pre and post-prandial bottles, entirely understanding the winter benefits of internal central heating. In that era, comfort food counted for naught without comfort wine; in our house it still does. Yet somehow sweet wines have lost their place on Britain’s tables – and their cachet.

Even skilful bottle-shifters such as Tesco, which counts for an alarming one in every four bottles of wine we drink at home, have let sweet wines slip off their radar. Until last summer, Tesco’s dessert wines were stocked willy-nilly on the shelves; but surprise, surprise, the minute the supermarket treated these wines seriously and sold them flagged up and together, sales rose by almost 70 per cent. Even so, sweet wines still account for less than 1 per cent of the total.

Successfully snuggling up to a sweet wine with food takes practice if you want to avoid feeling liverish and bloated the next day. Avoid stomach-filling starters and main courses, reserving all for a grand finale. A useful tip if you have diehard pudding wine refuseniks at your table is to serve sweet wines chilled – this takes the edge off their sweetness. Ditto serving in small glasses – the majority are at least one third more alcoholic than the average table wine, and some have twice the alcohol content.

Chocolate desserts are best partnered with bold, dry, fruity New World reds, but the next best thing is a gorgeous fortified sticky. Australia’s late-harvest muscat is one of the world’s greatest pudding wines and the tragedy is that few folk drink it. Break out and sip the superb, creamy, intensely sweet, figgy, chocolatey fruit of Mick Morris’s Liqueur Muscat, still made from ancient, hand-harvested, unirrigated brown muscat vines, and just £6.99 at Tesco.

Australia’s answer to vintage port – only more chocolate-friendly – is the amazing 2005 d’Arenberg Fortified Shiraz-Chambourcin (Oddbins, £17.99), with its silky, peppery, almost pepperminty spice. Lighter, drier but still with a sweet punch is the tangy, nutty, faintly marmaladey allure of Croix Milhas Rivesaltes Ambre from the Pyrenees, again a £7.99 snip (Tesco). I am a big fan of the stickiest sherry style of all, pedro ximénez, made from partially sun-dried grapes of the same name and traditionally used to sweeten other sherries. Careful pudding choices such as spotted dick or crème caramel are needed; it has twice the residual sugar of standard stickies. But a tiny glass of unctuous, creamy, spicy black moscatel raisin-stashed Taste the Difference 12 Year Old Pedro Ximénez (Sainsbury’s, £7.19 for 50cl) delivers warming winter cheer.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

2007 Gran Tempranillo, Cariñena, Spain, Sainsbury’s, £3.49. Halfway as the crow flies between Madrid and Barcelona, Cariñena has produced some great value reds over the past few years, and this rustic, earthy, spicy tempranillo, made from 20-year-old vines, is one of them.

2007 Old Vines Tempranillo, Spain, Sainsbury’s, £3.79. Have fun comparing and contrasting the richer, riper, more velvety, plummy fruit of this softly spicy old-vine tempranillo, grown in the Cordillera Ibérica mountains in northeast Spain, with the previous younger vine ’07.

2006 Cune Monopole Barrel Fermented Rioja Blanco, Spain, Waitrose, down to £5.75 until October 28. White rioja can be a chewy, malodorous mouthful, but Cune’s hand-harvested dream has consistently delivered all the rich, nutty, smoky oak and vanilla flavours that new and old rioja fans alike will adore.

2003 Gran Feudo Reserva, Navarra, Spain, Waitrose, down to £5.75 until October 28. Navarra, next door to Rioja, can produce wines that are on a par, and this elegant, spicy, plummy red, tempranillo- dominant but topped up with cabernet sauvignon and merlot, is a prime example.

2007 Mar d’Avall Garnatxa Blanca, Emporda, Jean-Marc Lafage, Spain, Bibendum (020-7449 4120), £8.99. Terrific, very unusual, contemporary Spanish white that oozes with fine citrus and faintly celery-scented herby fruit. Would make an arresting winter apéritif or fishy food white.

2006 Mar d’Amunt Carinyena, Emporda, Jean-Marc Lafage, Spain, Bibendum, £8.55. A clean sweep for Spain and why not, it’s almost the last place in Europe to deliver keenly priced first-class wines such as the perfumed, polished, savoury, herby spice of this brilliant carignan-dominant red.

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