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.

- HELEN ANDERSON

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.