Is wine a good traveller? continued...

There has been some recent correspondence on your turn about whether it is necessary to 'rest' bottles after a long journey before opening them.

I recounted the tale of a British wine merchant who flew in to India with a box of mature red bordeaux of various vintages and high-flown provenances, opened them almost immediately over a smart dinner and they all showed superbly.

Yesterday I savoured evidence of the inverse phenomenon. Australia's Prince of Riesling Jeffrey Grosset was in London last February and presented a vertical of his two Riesling bottlings Polish Hill and Watervale. The wines shown were...