“The perfect accompaniment to the White Horse Bay vista at the end of this glorious day was a chilled glass of white wine,” writes wine columnist RICHARD CALVER. 

There is something inveigling about the sea: its constant movement and change of colour, the susurration of the waves, the aroma of salt mixed with the heady coastal earth. 

Kate Chopin, in the 19th century book The Awakening captured these feelings perfectly: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. 

“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”

So, there I was sitting on the veranda of my Tathra house admiring the work I’d done in the garden and just looking at the sea, solo but held in its magnificent embrace. 

This is the contrast that any desk worker wants from their quotidian screen life. The day had been unusually hot, ahead of an expected overnight cool change and the perfect accompaniment to the White Horse Bay vista at the end of this glorious day was a chilled glass of white wine. 

So from the ethereal to the prosaic: my good friend Tom had told me that at Costco, where he regularly shops, they had Pikes 2023 Traditionale Riesling for a nudge under $20 a bottle. The winery’s website has them priced at $28 a bottle, so this was a bargain. He’d bought six of these bottles for me and I had taken one to Tathra. The winery says that these wines can be cellared for seven to 10 years but the 2023 is good drinking presently.

I held my glass up to the now fading light to be presented with a lovely straw colour. The bouquet was of citrus, lemon and lime.

The lime came through on first taste but with a hint of sweetness. The finish was slightly more acidic than I’d like, showing that the wine will keep for some time, but the feeling in the mouth was clean and refreshing. 

The winery’s tasting notes, viewed on return to Canberra, say this about the presence of acid: “A persistent, cool acid line in keeping with an unusually long and cool summer provides a framework around the pristine free-run juice and chalky minerality.” 

The winery says that the match for this wine is freshly shucked oysters dressed simply with a squeeze of lemon. 

Tathra has magnificent oysters, I’m told, but alas I cannot eat them as in my twenties I got terrible food poisoning from this delicacy and I can no longer look them in the eye. 

Sometimes the sea has its revenge: why don’t oysters give you charity? Because they’re shellfish. 

My dinner of chicken fried rice with lemon zest and added lemon was a good match for the riesling though and I’d suggest that it would be a good match for any seafood dish, prawns or mussels especially. 

What do you call fifty lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start –Anon