There might be a little bias at play here, given Lay & Wheeler’s heritage, but when it comes to exploring Christmas traditions, there’s good reason to start in the mid-19^th century. After all, many of the activities that yield the warm yuletide glow that we enjoy today – singing carols, exchanging cards, decorating the tree – have their roots in the Victorian age. Even mindless party games were part of the era’s festive formula (along, one must assume, with the family rows that inevitably ensue…).

A vivid picture of such celebrations is drawn in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, when John Lay was still secretary of his local hospital and George Wheeler was still in short trousers. Complete with rounds of Blindman’s Bluff and the Yes and No game, the timeless classic provides an insight into the festivities of a typical household – including wine. In the book’s heartwarming finale, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit enjoy a bowl of Smoking Bishop – a mulled wine spiked with port that sounds about as Christmassy as you can get.

Literary references provide a useful insight when it comes to tracking yuletide wine choices down the ages. Dickens, it seems, was something of a Port enthusiast; it's the most mentioned wine in his novels. In Bleak House – published in 1853, the year before Lay & Wheeler was founded – he describes the magic of a properly mature Port, as Tulkinghorn ‘pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes’. Sounds perfect with Stilton – already firmly established as a festive staple by the middle of the 19^th century (Mrs Beeton wrote of how Stilton ‘made in May or June are usually served at Christmas’ in her 1861 Book of Household Management). Goose, meanwhile, would have been traditional at the table of most families – hence Scrooge sending a boy to buy the ‘biggest goose he could find’ for the Cratchit family – with the then more exotic turkey only becoming more affordable – and widespread – a century later.

Poultry aside, Christmas fare has not changed hugely since Victorian times – and with good reason. For many of us, a large part of the holiday’s appeal lies in the warmth of nostalgia and familiarity. And while the choice available to wine lovers today would be beyond the imagination of even Dickens, the core pillars bear more than a passing resemblance to those of his time.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that, for many people, Port and Sherry remain Christmas staples. Back in the 1850s, fortified wines would have been almost the only option for most households, the extra alcohol allowing them to survive not just safe passage to the UK, but also the various less-than-airtight vessels in which they were housed once they got here. A Lay & Wheeler list from the late 19^th century boasts a whole page of sherries – 21 in total, all of which are annotated – loosely – by style rather than provenance. The descriptions range from the rather prosaic ‘pure, clean, pale wine’ and – immediately below this – the wonderfully efficient ‘Ditto, light gold’, to the middling ‘Pale and soft, recommended as a good dinner wine’. Then there is the more impressive-sounding ‘Pale, dry and delicate, with considerable age’, and the ‘Rich gold, a beautiful wine with much quality and age’. Finally comes the Manzanilla, which was noted as offering ‘a slight degree of bitterness’.

All were available in ‘Octaves, Quarter-Casks, Hogsheads and by the bottle’. The latter was then something of a rarity. According to Henry Jeffreys, co-host, with Tom Parker-Bowles, of the Intoxicating History podcast, it was only after Gladstone's Single Bottle Act of 1860 that grocers were allowed to sell wine by the bottle, paving the wine for table wines – notably branded claret – to take hold in middle-class households. In the years following the act, ‘There were even wines from Australia arriving on these shores, much to the consternation of traditionalists,’ says Jeffreys. Champagne was another novelty, he adds. Previously sweet and largely drunk in France and Russia, in the mid 19^th century, dry Champagne started to be made especially for the British market, intended as an apéritif.

Lay & Wheeler recommends: Try recreating a Victorian Christmas for yourself – an inexpensive red Bordeaux will help you create a Smoking Bishop,  or try a delicious dry Sherry or rich Port as a delicious after-dinner pick-me-up.

If Gladstone's Single Bottle Act a century earlier was a false start, a century later, British households were fully embracing wine as an accompaniment to the festive smoked salmon, roast turkey and yule log. Indeed, in the 1970s, Christmas was the perfect time to explore. By then, the assorted Liebfraumilchs of the ‘30s had spawned the dubious pleasure of brands such as Blue Nun and Black Tower. They were joined on the increasingly crowded supermarket shelves by such arrivistes as Mateus Rosé and Le Piat d'Or – maligned now but enthusiastically embraced back then, as a new generation of increasingly affluent enthusiasts began spreading their wings.

As in the 1920s, there would be some generational tension as New World wines championed on TV by Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden were increasingly in vogue. While the 1980s saw a run of great vintages in Bordeaux and a corresponding rise in prices, the thrusting young things in their red-framed glasses and striped shirts were lapping up Aussie Chardonnay and Shiraz even as grandad muttered that it ‘wasn't exactly claret’.

Nor was it just wine from the colonies. More exotic labels like Lebanon’s Chateau Musar became popular in the ’80s as the British palate grew increasingly adventurous. Auberon Waugh, the satirist and son of noted wine lover Evelyn Waugh, was a fan, describing the wine as ‘something between a hot-season Latour, a grand and ancient Hermitage and one of those magnificent old ‘cooked’ Burgundies bottled in England, which have now all but disappeared’.

Lay & Wheeler recommends: The exciting variety that the 70’s onwards would bring are still represented in our offering today; from delicious premium off-dry and sweet Rieslings that make an elevated choice for those looking to recreate their memories of retro sweet wines, to charming Rosé with it’s almost-magical food matching abilities, and of course some wonderful Australian wines, crafted by winemakers who know these unique terroirs like the back of their hand.