Cast your mind back, dear reader, to the year 2000. Pulp fans were actually able to discover what that girl in the song was doing on Sunday Baby (not much in reality, but the cafe at IKEA was open), Bordeaux produced a spectacular vintage, certainly a candidate for vintage of the century, although no one was fully sure whether it was the 20th or 21st century, and a group of winemakers in the Clare Valley banded together in protest at manky corks and released their Rieslings with Stelvin screwcap closures.

Now I’m not a Stelvin zealot. It’s a bit of metal that holds in an inert disc, in the hope that all the bottles opened anywhere around the world will contain something that bears more than a passing resemblance to what the winemaker put in them in the first place. Food writers write about things such as meat, cheese and vegetables, not the packaging in which they’re delivered to the end user. Shame then that so much wine writing over the past decade has been about packaging.

So why am I writing more words about Stelvin? Simply to say that on the evidence of the thoroughly splendid, svelte and delicious bottle of 2000 Mount Horrocks Watervale Riesling I’ve been on tonight, the closure did what it’s supposed to to the wine – nothing. It delivered a sleek, perfumed beauty, showing some toasty, honeyed age as it enters it’s tenth year, but with its lithe citrus, apple and mineral flavours shining through. Still wonderfully lively and zesty, with at least another five years life ahead of it – shame it was my last bottle…