Michael Shafer 1997 Riesling Kabinett

This wine is OLD. In two years this wine will be able to legally get married. In four years this wine will have the vote. Oh sorry, thanks for correcting me, it's a wine and is therefore unable to enter in to legal matrimony and is not technically a citizen. Yeah, THANKS, I wasn't aware of that. I certainly wasn't using personification for comic effect.

Anyway, apart from you being a pedantic cretin, this wine is as yet the oldest I have reviewed. It's fair to say that because I'm an epic loser, I mostly bought this wine because it was old. And cheap for its age. At £7 a bottle 14 years seems quite reasonable - 50p a year.

And what has 14 years of ageing done for this sweet little nugget of wine? Well, it's super balanced and super drinkable and as golden as... gold. It does rather lack intensity though, and compared with the pinot gris I reviewed a while back is a little less interesting. A nice wine, sweet and fragrant and entirely pleasant to drink, and balanced nicely with fairly a simple fish. Certainly worth the 14 year wait. And after all just think: in 1997, as Michael Shafer was brewing this wine in Germany, next door in France Princess Diana was being killed in a car crash.