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Itinerary: Wine
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If you’re a wine aficionado, why not build an entire itinerary around your favourite libation? Anywhere within Germany’s 13 growing regions you can tour estates, explore musty cellars stocked with vintage barrels and chin-wag with vintners during wine tastings. Or you could hike along vineyard trails, drink a toast to Bacchus in cosy wine taverns, then retire to your room on a wine estate.
Germany’s most famous grape is the noble riesling. The best vintages hail from the tiny Rheingau area, with tourist-ridden Rüdesheim at its heart, and from the Middle Rhine region (between Koblenz and Bingen), where Bacharach is the most appealing of the many wine towns. Fans of red wines should head to the Ahr Valley, best explored on a hike along the Rotweinwanderweg (Red Wine Hiking Trail). In southwestern Germany is the Baden region, whose Kaiserstuhl area produces exceptional late burgundies and pinot gris.
In and around Würzburg is the Franken region, whose vintners make excellent dry and earthy wines bottled in curvy green flagons called Bocksbeutel. Germany’s, and indeed Europe’s, northernmost growing region is Saale-Unstrut, with Freyburg at its centre. Its famous Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) sparkling wine was already popular in GDR times. Another eastern growing region – and the country’s smallest – is the Sächsische Weinstrasse around Meissen.
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