The Deutsche Weinstrasse
Established in 1935 as a way to boost local wine sales, the 85km-long Deutsche Weinstrasse (German Wine Route; deutsche-weinstrasse.de) meanders almost due north from the French border at Schweigen-Rechtenbach, connecting picturesque wine-growing villages that dot wooded hills of the Pfälzer Wald and the broad, flat Rhine valley. Not surprisingly, wine is the main attraction; much of it dry, white and made with Riesling grapes, though reds made with Pinot Noir are increasingly attracting praise. Alongside the lively and attractive “capital”, Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, the neat spa town of Bad Dürkheim is the main urban focus, though the region’s real charm is in its villages: alongside viticulture, a refined culinary scene has emerged in places like Deidesheim and the little walled town of Freinsheim. Hugely popular with Germans and also attracting many French and Dutch, the Route gets going in March, when the almond trees blossom. Travelling by car is easy; additionally, a cycle route, the Radweg Deutsche Weinstrasse, parallels the road and there’s a choice of hiking trails – the 153km Pfälzer Weinsteg, which sometimes follows the wooded heights, or the more direct, 96km Wanderweg Deutsche Weinstrasse.
The Mosel Weinstrasse
Along its final 195km-long stretch between Koblenz and Trier the Mosel cuts a sinuous and attractive deep gorge, home to some of Germany’s steepest vineyards and best full-bodied wines. The route that follows the banks of the river is known as the Mosel Weinstrasse, or Mosel Wine Road. This links a solid selection of traditional attractions, which include the faultless medieval castle Burg Eltz, Traben-Trarbach with its attractive Jugendstil villas and Bernkastel-Kues, the Weinstrasse’s most colourful town.
Bernkastel-Kues
The twin town of BERNKASTEL-KUES nestles by a serpentine bend in the Mosel, some 8km on foot through woods and steep vineyards from Traben-Trarbach, but the terrain is such that the road takes 17km to link the two and the river an even twistier 24km. Against this scenic backdrop, Bernkastel-Kues is a half-timbered gem. Predictably, it’s touristy, but with some of the wonkiest houses you’ll ever see and wall-to-wall with wine taverns to help distort their dimensions even more, it’s a place that shouldn’t be passed up. There’s always a cheerful buzz about town, but things are liveliest on the first September weekend when gallons of the local Bernkastelr Doctor wine are downed with spirited results – even the Marktplatz fountain flows with wine.
The Nürburgring
The Eifel, the tranquil region immediately northwest of the Mosel valley, is known for sleepy villages, gentle hills and bare heathland, but famous for the incongruous Nürburgring (02691 30 26 30, nuerburgring.de), a racetrack that’s one of motorsport’s most hallowed pieces of tarmac.
Among aficionados, its Nordschleife (north loop), completed in 1927, is widely considered the world’s toughest, most dangerous and most demanding purpose-built racetrack. With 73 curves along its 22.8km length it proved so difficult that over the years it’s claimed dozens of lives, including those of four Formula One drivers. Jackie Stewart dubbed it “The Green Hell”, though he chalked up three wins here, including one of his finest ever in the rain and fog of 1968. Some eight years later Niki Lauda’s near-fatal crash caused race organizers to move things to Mannheim’s Hockenheimring in 1977, though the building of the Südschleife in 1984 brought Formula One back and it now alternates with the Hockenheimring as the venue for the annual German Grand Prix. Other motorsports and novelty events, such as old-timer races, also regularly use the track, but when these aren’t on it’s possible to drive the Nordschleife (generally daily 9am–dusk, but check online first; €22). Despite common misconceptions to the contrary, German road law applies: speed limits exist, though not everywhere, and passing on the right is prohibited. For an inside view of the real deal and speeds of up to 320kmph, book a seat in the BMW Ring-Taxi (March–Nov Mon–Fri 10am–noon; 02691 93 20 20, bmw-motorsport.com/ms_en), who charge €195 for up to three people (including those over 150cm). It’s popular and often booked up months in advance, though last-minute cancellations are not unheard of.
Otherwise visit the excellent visitor centre ringwerk (Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–6pm; €19.50) with its many white-knuckle high-tech racing simulators, films and exhibits, which will keep kids busy for hours.
The Nürburgring lies 46km west of Koblenz and is tricky to get to using public transport: look online under bahn.de for train and bus connections from your nearest town to “Nürburgring welcome center”. The nearest train station is Mayen; buses also arrive from Adenau.
The Rheingau
West of Mainz, on the gently sloping north bank of the Rhine, lies the Rheingau, one of Germany’s most prestigious wine-growing regions, known for its Riesling and Spätburgunder or Pinot Noir. The English term Hock for German wines derives from Hochheim near Wiesbaden, whose wines found favour with Queen Victoria. It’s a region of photogenic, vine-clad hillsides and pretty villages, and one unmissable attraction: the hauntingly beautiful Gothic monastery of Kloster Eberbach. At the western end of the region, the day-tripper magnet of Rüdesheim balances brash commercialism with a range of fine- and wet-weather attractions.
The Rheingau has a busy programme of wine-related festivals all year round, from a gourmet festival in early March to Kiedrich’s Rieslingfest in June and the Riesling Gala at Kloster Eberbach in November. Tourist offices have details.
Rüdesheim
After the beauty and tranquillity of the Rheingau landscape, first impressions of Rüdesheim can come as a shock, above all the noisy, crowded Drosselgasse, a narrow lane leading up from the river into which tour groups are funnelled for an over-amplified facsimile of German joviality. Having suffered wartime bombardment, Rüdesheim’s not even consistently pretty. Yet beneath the veneer of plastic oompah lurks a genuine wine-growing village with quaint and peaceful corners worth exploring, including at the uphill end of Drosselgasse on Oberstrasse where the half-timbered Brömserhof at no. 29 dates from 1542 and now houses Siegfried’s Mechanisches Musikkabinett (March–Dec daily 10am–6pm; €6), a quirky collection of musical automata. Another saggy half-timbered beauty worth seeking out is the early sixteenth-century Klunkhardshof, in a narrow lane off Markt two blocks east of Drosselgasse. Meanwhile, at the eastern edge of town – a twenty-minute walk from the centre – you can watch a short presentation and buy a variety of local brandies from the Asbach distillery at the Asbach Besucher Center, Ingelheimer Str. 4 (March–Dec Tues–Sat 9am–5pm; free; asbach.de).
The Rheingau wine routes
Separate but broadly parallel – the Rheingauer-Riesling Route for cars, the Riesling Radwanderweg for cyclists and the Rieslingpfad for hikers – meander west from Wiesbaden past vineyards, villages and historic landmarks, with plenty of spots to stop and sample local wines along the way, including seasonal wine-maker-run Strausswirtschaften.
The cyclists’ route stays closest to the river while the hikers’ route hugs the higher and more scenic ground on the fringe of the Taunus, but all three thread their way through wine-growing villages – Eltville, Kiedrich, Oestrich-Winkel among them – and pass Kloster Eberbach.
The Romantic Rhine
Upstream from Rüdesheim, the banks of the Rhine gradually rear up to form a deep, winding 65km-long gorge popularly known as the Romantic Rhine, thanks to a series of quaint towns and a bewildering number of castles. Of course much of this romance is pure fabrication, first by the German Romantics, who rebuilt many of the castles in the nineteenth century, and subsequently by the tourist and wine industries, but nevertheless the gorge’s unique geological, historical and cultural features have put it on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.
The gorge itself is composed of a type of slate sedimentary rock, folds in which produced the Hunsrück mountains to the west and the Taunus mountains to the east, while the Rhine carved a passage between the two, creating steep, two-hundred-metre-high walls, and its own sheltered, sun-trap microclimate. Many of the riverbank’s slopes were terraced for agriculture from an early age, the south-facing ones in particular providing near-perfect conditions for viticulture. This, together with booming trade along the river, brought wealth to the string of small riverside settlements whose rulers built a series of castles to protect their interests and levy tolls. This racket was lucrative enough to make this area an important region in the Holy Roman Empire and a focus for much of the Thirty Years’ War. The latter left many castles in ruins, as did French campaigns that briefly claimed this region as part of France until Prussia turned the tables in the early nineteenth century.
The Prussians then spearheaded the reinvention of the place as a sort of quintessential Germany, rebuilding legendary castles and featuring it in much of the art of the time. Wagner, for example, uses this stretch of the Rhine as the setting for his powerful Götterdämmerung. Since then, the tourist industry has lapped all this up, making coach parties an integral part of the scenery. However, don’t be put off: many castles are certainly worth a look as are many Weinstuben, where you can taste excellent local vintages. The annual Rhine in Flames festival – which also takes place in Koblenz – is another draw, with spectacular fireworks filling the September skies above St Goar.
This stretch of the Rhine offers the full range of transport options: drive, follow cycle paths or take trains up either side of the river, while car ferries cross the river in several places. But probably the most relaxing way to travel and appreciate the scenery is by boat – and several companies offer hop-on, hop-off services – many conveniently beginning in Mainz, Rüdesheim or Koblenz. If you’re pressed for time a day-trip is all you’ll need to get a feel for the place, but if you’re keen to explore some of the castles, you’ll need an extra day or two.
Boppard
Strung along the outside of a horseshoe bend in the Rhine, 21km south of Koblenz and 14km upstream of St Goar, BOPPARD is a sizeable and attractive place, which is reasonably touristy, despite having few real sights. Its great assets are its riverfront promenade and a chairlift that takes visitors to the Vierseenblick, an attractive viewpoint above town.
The place centres on its right-angled Marktplatz, home to a Friday-morning market and the late Romanesque Severuskirche, in which tender medieval frescoes venerate its patron saint. The square south of the church is the busiest and adjoins main shopping-street Oberstrasse. Crossing it is Kirchgasse, which leads to the Römer-Kastell, a preserved part of Boppard’s fourth-century Roman walls. Of the 28 watchtowers that once graced the military camp, four have been preserved and illustrations on information boards here help conjure up the past.
Gedeonseck and the Vierseenblick
The 1950s chairlift at Boppard’s northern end, Sesselbahn Boppard, makes its unhurried journey to two premier views, each with attendant restaurant and attractive terrace. Gedeonseck, near the summit of the chairlift, affords perfect views of the Rhine’s hairpin curve; while a five-minute walk further on, the famous Vierseenblick, or Four Lakes View, is so-called because the four visible sections of the Rhine look disconnected. The pleasant wooded terrain around here is home to a few good hikes, the most rewarding and adventurous of which is the Klettersteig: a clamber up precipitous rock faces with the aid of chains and ladders set into the rock. It’s best climbed rather than descended – a perfect three-hour -loop for the reasonably fit, starting from the base of the chairlift, which you can use to get back down if your legs give out.
It’s also possible to drive or cycle up to the Vierseenblick, and locals have built a pretty hairy mountain-bike trail from the summit – day-passes for taking a bike on the chairlift cost €12.
Trier
South of Bernkastel-Kues the landscape around the Mosel gradually opens up, so that TRIER, 50km downstream, sits among gentle hills. But most visitors pay little attention to the landscape, for the city has northern Europe’s greatest assemblage of Roman remains. But Trier is not a city that lives entirely on its past, and the vineyards around town, along with a large student population, help liven things up, while the proximity to Luxembourg and France provides a cosmopolitan feel that makes it an immediately likeable and easy-going place. It’s also a good base for day-trips, not just along the Mosel valley but also to Völklinger Hütte and Saarbrücken. And if you’re driving don’t forget to nip over to Luxembourg for the cheap fuel – price differences have spawned a minor industry just over the border.
Brief history
Founded as Augusta Treverorum in 15 BC, Trier grew to become capital of the western Roman Empire by the third century AD. As Rome declined, Trier fell into the hands of various tribes, including the Huns under Attila, until the Franks eventually asserted themselves at the end of the fifth century, ushering in a period of relative stability which saw the city gain independence from Ostfrankenreich in 1212 and become an archbishopric in 1364. This sparked a second golden age when its archbishops became prince-electors and vital imperial power-brokers.