VINES WITH VIEWS
On a cruise through Germany’s Mosel Valley wine region, HELEN ANDERSON tastes the world’s finest rieslings at their vertiginous source.
On a cruise through Germany’s Mosel Valley wine region, Helen Anderson tastes the finest rieslings.
By mid-morning the cobbled lanes of Bernkastel are overtaken by travellers marvelling at the town’s medieval marketplace and gabled half-timbered houses. The scene is so chocolate-box, so fairytale, it might have been the setting for the Brothers Grimm fantasy about a couple of naughty kids and a cannibalistic witch. The weinstuben (wine taverns) are full, the strudel shops busy. Just a short, steep walk from the selfie-snappers lining up at the 17th-century town hall, however, and not far from the remains of the Graach Gate, built in 1300, is a little vineyard unnoticed by the crowd below. I pick an alley and climb to a narrow road flanked by a high stone terrace. Butterflies flit, birds sing, and the sun shines on the most valuable vines in Germany, a vertiginous south-west slope of Mosel Valley riesling with roots deep in sharp blue Devonian slate.
This is the Bernkasteler Doctor, a mere 3.26 hectares of rock and vine – ungrafted, some planted a century ago. It’s hard to imagine the soil is much different from that of surrounding plots, but this one certainly benefits from its starring role in a 14thcentury legend. As depicted in carvings on a fountain in the village, the region’s grandee, Archbishop Boemund II, developed a sickness that many tried to treat but no one could cure – until he was given a good dose of wine from this plot. He made a miraculous recovery, and the revived prelate conferred the name “doctor” on the vineyard. The sentiment seems to have spread – quite a few Mosel wineries bear the name doctor – but this one is the most famous.
Its status is nudged along by exclusivity – the vineyard has been owned by just two families, named Thanisch and Wegeler, for 130 years – and intrigue, after the discovery of a secret stash of very old bottles hidden in a crypt from the plunderers of World War II.
The good doctor is one of 500 or so wineries with vineyards that cling to the steep, slate banks of the Mosel river as it carves through Germany.
For those who love their wine, a cruise along the curvaceous Mosel offers dramatic scenery and the chance to taste the finest rieslings in the world at their source. The river twists and turns for 544 kilometres from the Vosges mountains in eastern France, through Luxembourg and Germany to its confluence with the mighty Rhine at the pretty German town of Koblenz. From here the Rhine empties into the North Sea near Amsterdam, where our cruise begins and ends.
The Crystal Bach is anchored just a short walk from Amsterdam Centraal, and there’s a full day of touring before we set sail in which to commune with Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch masters at the Rijksmuseum, dodge the world’s most assertive cyclists, and lounge in the city’s convivial canal-side brown bars.
Dutch captain Douwe Tilstra sets sail with 86 passengers (shy of the maximum 106), 76 crew and an impressive collection of wine. Like the crew, the wines are mainly European and well chosen: good German Mosel rieslings, of course, Austrian grüner veltliners, a Viennese gemischter satz (field blend), and a mix of German, Austrian, Italian, French and Californian reds. The canal is swift and grey, but inside the Waterside Restaurant the waitstaff are warming up, charming the mainly American passengers with lemon sole atop a rich lobster and potato rosti, and scallops seared in porcini butter, and rib-sticking “local” dishes, the likes of pork loin stuffed with prunes and blood sausage with napkin dumplings, and braised beef with spätzle.
We arrive in Düsseldorf next morning, but it’s not until the following day when we take a turn at Koblenz, leaving the Rhine and entering the slower Mosel, that I start to feel the curative effects of sunshine, a deckchair, a glass of wine and a vine-clad valley.
The Crystal Bach slows to a stately adagio, keeping pace with cyclists spinning along river paths. Children splash in the shallows and wave, geese flap and honk in protest, but mostly there’s birdsong and bucolic peace. The weather warms. The river traffic thins.
At sunrise I throw open the curtains, and a pair of white swans glides into view. Along with personal butler service, a special feature of Crystal Cruises’ four new-age river ships is the swift conversion of all rooms into open balconies at the flick of a switch.
Crystal Bach on the outskirts of Trier. Opposite: houses in Bernkastel’s market square. PREVIOUS PAGES Left and right: views of Mosel river vineyards in Bernkastel.
Through my open window, the pastel-coloured town of Bernkastel lies centrestage, across a stone bridge. Vines ascend vertically to a ruined castle on a ridge above, gilded by the morning sun. Like many others, we’re drawn like moths to the photogenic Spitzhäuschen, the Pointed House. Built in 1416, this doll’s house is among the oldest structures in Bernkastel, now a tiny wine bar. We wander along the riverfront and settle for a pre-lunch wine tasting in Doctor Pauley-Bergweiler’s cool underground cellar, used for 250 years to store wine from grapes grown a few metres away.
Our wine tasting begins in the village of Lieser.
Like many Mosel winemakers, Thomas Haag and his family welcome guests who call ahead to arrange tours and tastings (and the Crystal concierge desk happily obliges). Haag and his wife Ute bought the Schloss Lieser estate in the early ’90s, and have restored the handsome stone buildings and cellars and expanded their holdings on seven Grand Cru sites. That’s 185 plots to manage. “Each one I know,” says Haag as he pours a half-dozen of his wines of increasing elegance and complexity from his portfolio of about 40 wines. “I know the soil and I know how the vines develop and respond to a variety of conditions.”
Next morning we moor on the outskirts of Trier, a small city by today’s standards but once HQ of the West Roman empire. While some passengers head to Luxembourg for lunch, only about 15 kilometres away, I join a bike tour of the city. We drop in at the oldest cathedral in Germany, where the acoustics are set to ethereal for a Sundaymorning choir. And we spin around the Hauptmarkt, the city’s largest market square, packed with townhouses whose architectural influences lurch from renaissance and baroque to classicist and late historicist. “We call wine the Roman gift,” our guide Wolfgang says. The Romans planted their vines on slopes that are still producing wine today; every Roman soldier was given a litre of wine a day, drunk diluted with water. We find an encyclopaedic list bound like a bible at a wine bar called Das Weinhaus, opposite the house in which Karl Marx was born. I count 32 rieslings by the glass, and all the heavyhitters have extensive vintages and ranges packed to the bar’s rafters: JJ Prüm, Volxem, Egon Müller, Loosen, Schloss Lieser, Willi Schäfer. A frisky young trocken by Doctor Loosen is perfect with a sunny lunch of schnitzel and spargel, the thumb-thick white asparagus that, for me, symbolises springtime in Europe.
We pass several of the region’s top vineyards on a drive upriver into the Saar Valley, a tributary of the Mosel. The hills are more pillowy here, the nights cooler, the slate reddish, the vineyards marked by trellises and rosebushes blooming at row ends, used as an indicator of insect infestation. We’re heading to Raevenhof, a postcard-pretty vineyard and guesthouse run by Lydia Reuter and her 18-year-old son. They produce about 10,000 bottles a year, mainly riesling, the grapes picked by hand and naturally fermented. Reuter invites us to taste her wines, explaining the complicated classification system for trocken (dry), feinherbe (semi-dry) and fruchtig (sweet) riesling, and telling stories of 3am harvests for eiswein, the complex sweet wine made from grapes frozen on the vine and picked when the air temperature is precisely minus-seven degrees.
There’s more wine education aboard Crystal Bach, where head sommelier Domagoj Binder and waitstaff encourage diners to ask questions as they pour from the all-inclusive list and a “connoisseur” list not included in the tariff. The wines are even more boutique in the Vintage Room, a private room for 10 diners who book ahead for elaborate dégustations matched with Grand Crus and special wines.
Days aboard Crystal Bach are punctuated by the oddly exciting theatre of lock navigation. There are eight of them on our cruise, the dark chambers so narrow that the Bach is manoeuvred through with a scant 15 centimetres clear on each side. Drinks on the deck, meanwhile, are often interrupted briefly on approach to low bridges, when passengers need to be seated and the cleverly designed “pop-up” bar pops down as if it and the bar staff inside are riding an elevator.
I’m on the top deck one morning when we round a curve in the river and there, looming ahead, is a dark castle bristling with parapets and crowned by a turreted fairytale tower. The medieval-era Reichsburg castle, sacked by French troops in the 17th century and rebuilt in the late 19th century in a gothic-revival style, is the glory of Cochem. The town’s marktplatz is a mishmash of half-timbered buildings and neoclassical piles, its cobbled streets full of residents walking their dachshunds, shops selling wines and vines, and stalls dispatching sausages slathered in mustard.
There’s only so much wine and wurst a girl can take, so on a golden afternoon I flick the power switch on an electric bicycle and follow cyclist, guide and nature photographer Lothar Lenz along the banks of the Mosel.“I’ve travelled all my life to photograph nature, but these days I want to focus on what’s unique here, where I live,” he says. We wind through meadows fringed by oaks and elderflower, and vineyards dotted with peach trees distinctive to the slopes of this valley. The Ancient Romans introduced the trees to this region, and the tart, bright-red fruit of the vineyard peaches is used to make a liqueur called weinbergpfirsich. I down a shot on the way back to the ship that afternoon, before the day’s first glass of riesling.
I count 32 rieslings by the glass, and all the heavyhitters have extensive vintages and ranges packed to the bar’s rafters.