After 11 hours of non-stop translating from Finnish to English of a badly translated Russian document, what is the right thing to do to get back into a happy mood? Get a bottle of Riesling and a good book.
I still had two bottles of Robert Vile's Kiedrich Gräfenberg Riesling Spätlese 2004 so I opened one thinking I'd let the second rest for some years more. But the first had some sort of mechanical cork failure so the wine was brown and oxidized.
At which point I felt that the producer has an aptronym.
My reasoning thereafter went like this: Riesling improves with age, but it is wonderful in all stages of its life. So why not open the last one now? And so I did.
Wonderfully steely sweetness, a touch of honey and petrol; elegant, light, intense and wonderful in every way. And just as it was when younger and just as it will be in a decade, this was the perfect time to drink it.