All Aboard!

A new wave of culinary experiences by boat rival anything on dry land. Here are 15 reasons to set sail now.

DRINK

1. Explore Wine Country by Water

WHAT’S BETTER THAN rambling through France’s Alsace and Germany’s Rheingau wine regions—some of the prettiest wine country in the world—by car or bike? Sailing through it by boat, as my husband and I recently discovered: No designated drivers (or even gross motor skills beyond lifting a glass, really) are needed.

It would be hard to find a more luxurious boat than the AmaMora. The 78-room river ship is home to a seven-night, food-and-wine-themed cruise on the Rhine River as it winds north from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. The cruise is a partnership between Adventures by Disney and AmaWaterways, and there are two similar sailings planned for 2019.

River travel at this level is absurdly civilized: We unpacked once, slept in the same bed every night, and woke up each morning to a new destination. Aboard ship, six affable Disney “adventure guides” operated as chaperones, storytellers, and fixers.

As the trip progressed, one day we found ourselves standing in the tiny Alsatian village of Riquewihr, sampling the local Pinot Blanc and Crémant (our 2018 sailing included a visit to the Dopff winery). The next, we canoed down a canal before descending into one of the oldest wine caves in Europe, under the 14th-century hospital in Strasbourg, where we sniffed a (now undrinkable, but still fascinating) 546-year-old wine.

Then, trading France for Germany, where steep vineyards slope dramatically down much of this length of the Rhine, we sipped a spritzy trocken (dry) Kabinett in a vineyard in Rüdesheim, a mere 10 minutes’ walk from where we disembarked the boat.