Day of wine and a rosy glow

THIS WOMAN I’VE been seeing lately says she just discovered her chocolate yogurt contains more sugar than the ice cream she had been trying to avoid. But the ice cream has more fat.

“What are you supposed to do?” she pleads, and I mumble something about having a glass of wine instead, which would probably be healthier and put a happy-hour glow in her lovely, long-married cheeks.

“Chocolate wine!” she says proudly, and spins back toward the other end of the house, reborn.

Chocolate wine. Now there’s a Valentine’s gift for you, not to mention your next great fortune. I mean, I’ve had some good chocolate cigars in my time, chocolate fondue, even sipped a chocolate martini. But I’ve never seen or tasted a chocolate wine. Imagine that, a wine by Godiva? Talk about your aphrodisiacs.

Just send the royalties directly to my wife.

I know the exact spot where her back always itches -- about 8 o’clock, if her back were a Rolex -- and when I remind my wife of this, this little piece of intimacy academia, she is mostly unimpressed.

“Yeah, OK,” she says, focused instead on figuring out how to get chocolate to ferment.

We have been dating -- on and off and on -- for almost 27 years. I know her favorite football team (the Dolphins) and her favorite vegetable (asparagus). She prefers romaine lettuce over red leaf and tea over coffee. Snickers over Milky Way. The sound of a sparrow in the spring to Pavarotti.

See, I’ve been paying tons of attention, even if it doesn’t always seem so. Like a great spy, I just try to blend in with the woodwork and absorb as much as possible about my target.

Physically, I know her too, though I still have much to learn. I recently chipped a tooth on her earring, while thrashing about trying to locate her mouth.

“Those diamonds are really dangerous,” I told her.

“Those aren’t diamonds,” she said.

Leave it to me to chip a tooth on cubic zirconia. I’ve had a slight lisp ever since, or to hear me say it aloud: “a thlight lithsp ever thinsth,” which emerges strangely enough only during romantic interludes. It’s a small price to pay for ever-lasting lust.

“Be a student of your wife, Andrew,” I remember a preacher saying at a wedding once, urging the poor groom to study-study-study his new bride’s every move.

I’ve been trying to do that ever since, though like in school, my study habits can be sporadic.

So I take study breaks and scratch her back. In that 8 o’clock spot. After a certain age, everything is foreplay.

HEADS up, boys. Valentine’s Day is coming up. This year it’s on Feb. 14. Don’t let it catch you by surprise.

If you’re tapped out on gift ideas, let me suggest some really great chocolate, which is what we really should’ve been feeding them in college instead of all that Bacardi and Coke.

Here’s another tip. In New Orleans, they’ve concocted a new chocolate drink in honor of a recent gaffe by the mayor, who seems to have been born with a chocolate foot in his mouth, don’t get me started.

But even after the disaster of last August, New Orleans is still a better city than most, if you measure such things in heart, good restaurants and an almost spooky sense of romance, which is the way to measure most things. When the good people down there come up with a new recipe, it pays to pay attention:

1 ounce chocolate liqueur

1 ounce creme de menthe

1 ounce vodka

1/2 ounce grated chocolate

Shake with ice, pour straight up into a martini glass. Garnish with a vanilla bean.

Even to a devoted beer guy like me, this thing’s pretty yummy.

If you’re in a spin about what to buy her for Valentine’s, you could do worse than purchasing her a plush new robe, pulling her a hot bath and pouring her one of these chocolate concoctions, which she can sip while you make soapy figure eights on her pretty back with a warm, soft washcloth.

Remember, it’s Feb. 14 this year. We had our Super Bowl, now they get theirs.

Latest line: women favored by 14.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.