Racy, lively, fresh-elegant", that's how my German wine friends describe their favorite wine: Riesling, dry. But for my Swiss palate - just used to Swiss wines - it is not so "dry", the German Riesling. And this is not so much a question of residual sugar - which is certainly far below the permitted 9 g/l for dry wines - but rather a subjective taste perception that I - as a notorious red wine drinker - have acquired. Something else is sure to happen when my wine friends read this "drunk": they slap their hands together over their heads - vintage 2008 - much too old for a "crisp" Riesling. To this I reply: no, it is not too old, it is clarified. It is precisely these "clarified" wines - this type of Riesling - that I love. It is storable, that is not a question for me at all. But it's not about estimating the time until a white wine becomes a corpse. In the case of a Spätlese - like this one - that can certainly be ten or more years. It's more about how a wine that is getting on in years develops. Maybe you have to give it some time - and not always drink it away young - in order to come to more differentiated taste impressions 
to learn that mineral is not just mineral, and "crisp" is not just "crisp, and racy is not just racy. There is much more behind it: a whole world of experience that is difficult to put into words. Are we still used to such experiences at all, or rather, are we receptive to them? Based on many discussions I have to conclude: no. Youth is in demand, a "youthful character", whatever one may understand by it. This six year old Riesling from Pechstein (Forst, Pfalz) is neither old nor venerable, but also no longer young, nothing for primary fruit drinkers, but also still nothing (or little) for old wine drinkers (if such still exist for dry Riesling!) It is, so to speak, an intermediate phase in which the wine is stuck, and - I confess it - just right for me. It has shed the sometimes nervous liveliness and is about to dive into elegant worlds, into silence, maybe even into a posh world, but not necessarily where the celebrities meet. The wine still shows a lot of its origin from a long eroded volcanic area in the form of minerality and a clear share of extinguished fire or flint.