Picking the Wines for Your Funeral…
I’m boning up on my wineglass history for today’s segment on our local NBC affiliate, and was reading a 1999 Wine Spectator article about Georg Riedel (rhymes with needle). Big picture: He brought the company back to life & profitability after it was nationalized by the Czech communist government after WW2, but he lives in fear that his company will be taken away from him again:
“I wake up every morning with fear,” he says. “I have this fear that someday, someone will take away my business. It’s pure fear of failing. The worst thing in my life would be that I would fail. From day one of my life I was born with this fear, and I can’t get rid of it. This makes me run.”
And it makes him plan everything, even the wines to be served at his funeral….Behind a wall lie…. 60 bottles of a top 1979 Austrian trockenbeerenauslese from Freie Weingärtner in the Wachau. Riedel has set aside these dessert wines for his funeral.”
“You know, I am planning many things,” says Riedel. “The last thing I can do is to plan what people drink at my funeral. Maybe it’s a day in November and it is raining and my friends will like to have a sweet wine.”I suppose this makes sense, and yet… Do I also have to pick a cake? Write the guest list? Track down addresses? Pre-wrap gift-bags? Get the perfect dress and do a lot of Pilates to fit into it? I have to say, when I think of my own death, as I now am, the most appealing part seems like that it gets you off the hook vis a vis event-planning.
